"Today" Trounces "Good Morning America"

The unstoppable dominance of "Today" remains unstoppable, per MediaWeek. While Katie Couric has a long, hard slog to move CBS out of third place in the evening news (as was to be expected), her replacement Meredith Viera benefits from the very same desire of viewers to stick with the tried and true. Today is averaging 5.69 million viewers season to date (up 1%), Good Morning America is averaging 4.85 million (down 8%) and CBS's The Early Show is at 2.64 million (down 6%). Viera has moved smoothly into the co-anchor slot but this has as much to do with settled viewer patterns as anything else. That hard-to-budge audience changes slowly and it's hurting Couric and helping Viera. A switch in anchors is the rare time when those patterns can get adjusted and it could still happen in the morning race, but the seamlessness of Viera's entry doesn't bode well for Diane Sawyer.