How could you?

CBS News chief on Bob Schieffer's return: 'How could you sit out a year like this?'

By Alex Weprin

CBS News is riding high. The network beat every other channel on TV when it came to State of the Union coverage last week with 6.9 million viewers tuning in, and all of its shows are seeing significant ratings improvements, from “CBS This Morning” and the “CBS Evening News” to “Face the Nation.”

“There is a lot of red on here, and all of our numbers are black,” CBS News president David Rhodes told POLITICO, looking over a ratings chart that showed the competition from NBC and ABC down year over year, and CBS up. “ABC is down pretty dramatically, especially in the demo lately, and NBC is pretty soft. This is obviously all really encouraging.”

Rhodes was particularly pleased with the growth at “Face The Nation,” which routinely tops both NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week” (with the caveat that “Face” is still only rated as a half hour show, compared to an hour for the competition, which changes the ratings dynamic somewhat).

Rhodes gave much of the credit to John Dickerson, who took over as moderator of the long-running program last June, succeeding Bob Schieffer. In particular, Rhodes argued that Dickerson has expanded the scope of topics that the Sunday shows cover, moving beyond the horse race to other issues.

“John said to me, we were talking this morning, he was traveling, as he usually is, and he said that he felt like left and right pundits seemed to appreciate the questions we asked, in terms of being tough on Hillary, tough on Christie, tough on Ryan,” Rhodes said. “But one thing that was interesting to John is that we spent a chunk of the show talking to Ryan about poverty, and no one is talking about that, and it did great.”

Last week CBS News also announced that Schieffer would be returning to the network in a new capacity: contributing commentary segments to CBS News programming through the next President’s inauguration in 2017. Rhodes said he initiated that move.

“I reached out to Bob, in the sense that going all the way back, Bob’s retirement in the first place was a conversation between me and him that evolved over time, and resulted in his April announcement and doing the last show around Memorial Day,” Rhodes said. “Bob has stayed close, I asked him, ‘how about Iowa through the inauguration?’ And he was up for it.

“There is so much interest in politics right now, that you can’t have enough assets on politics,” he added. “I think we have good assets, but we could always use more. And he is enthusiastic about it. If you are interested in this subject matter, how could you sit out a year like this?”