CBS News Names John Dickerson as Next Anchor of 'Face the Nation'

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 [e-mail]

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