CBS AND NBC TIE IN KEY RATINGS ‘SWEEPS’ PERIOD

Bolstered by Joan Collins’ miniseries “Sins” and closing-week Nielsen victories for “Blood & Orchids” and the Grammy Awards telecast, CBS has tied NBC in prime-time ratings averages for the key ratings “sweeps” period that began Jan. 30 and ended Wednesday.

“We’re calling it a moral victory,” a CBS spokesman said, partly in jest.

After six seasons as the prime-time ratings winner, CBS now is second to NBC in season-to-date ratings averages, but is given little chance of winning this season’s race, even with the A.C. Nielsen results for the February sweeps.

According to those audience estimates, CBS and NBC wound up in a dead heat at the end of the four-week period, with each averaging a 17.8 rating and a 27% share of the national audience. ABC, which ended last season in third place and is still there, came out third in the February battle, averaging a 15 rating and a 23% audience share.

Each ratings point equals 859,000 homes.

The ratings sweeps, of which there are four a year, are periods when Nielsen measures the audience for every TV station in the country, not just those in the largest cities or that are network affiliates. The stations use the ratings reports to set prices for the air time that they hope to sell to advertisers.

CBS’ tie with NBC during the just-completed race was in large part due to two miniseries. Its “Sins” bested NBC’s “Peter the Great” as February began, followed by a Sunday-Monday victory this week for CBS’ “Blood & Orchids” against ABC’s “Crossings.”

Although knocked by some critics, CBS’ telecast of Tuesday night’s Grammy Awards show also greatly aided the network’s cause. The three-hour show averaged a 20.3 rating, easily outpacing its closest competition, the closing night of “Crossings,” which got a 17.4.

Despite CBS’ sweeps-period tie with NBC, the Peacock Network still found something to crow about. A spokesman, considering the tie a shared victory, said it was the fourth sweeps victory in a row for NBC.

The resurgent network, for nine seasons third in prime time ratings, ended last season in second place, and now is bidding to win its first prime-time season since 1954.

Locally, meanwhile, KABC-TV Channel 7 was the big winner among the three network-owned stations in the fiercely competitive news ratings during February. Its weeknight newscasts at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. drew larger audiences than those on KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KNBC Channel 4.

KNBC Channel 4 won the news battle between 4 and 5 p.m. and also registered what it called significant gains on its other news shows from the same period a year ago. It finished second at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Officials at both KNBC and KCBS-TV charged that KABC-TV had manipulated the 11 p.m. ratings by scheduling “specials” instead of news at that hour on three of the four Fridays during the sweeps period so that those newscasts wouldn’t be included in the monthly average. KABC’s Friday night news typically doesn’t do as well as other nights because of the low-rated network programming that precedes it.

“Either KABC feels Friday is a slow news day or they realized that running their late news after their lowest-rated prime-time series could hurt their late news rating average,” a KCBS spokeswoman contended.