By Joe Flint
CBS News has tapped its political director John Dickerson to
succeed Bob Schieffer, who is retiring as anchor of the Sunday
morning news program "Face the Nation" this summer.
Already a familiar face on "Face the Nation," where he has
appeared more than 80 times, Mr. Dickerson has been with CBS since
2009. Prior to that, he had stints at Time Magazine and Slate, also
focusing on politics.
While audiences for the Sunday news shows are typically fairly
small and older, they attract viewers with high median incomes and
thus are of interest to advertisers, particularly from the
financial and health sectors. "Face the Nation," which runs for an
hour, averaged 3.54 million viewers for the first half-hour and 2.8
million for the second in the first quarter of 2015, according to
Nielsen. However, CBS doesn't rate the show as a full hour because
one-fourth of the country doesn't run the show in an hour
format.
NBC's "Meet the Press," which also has a relatively new anchor
in Chuck Todd, averaged 3 million viewers and ABC's "This Week" had
2.9 million viewers.
Mr. Dickerson is a second generation CBS reporter. His mother
Nancy Dickerson was the first female correspondent in the network's
Washington bureau. CBS is a unit of CBS Corp.
Write to Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com
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