Which Triangle TV station newscast is on top? ABC11, CBS 17 & WRAL ratings race
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Nielsen data show WRAL led 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. viewership; ABC11 won mornings.
- ABC11 grew early‑morning share while WRAL and Fox 50 lost viewers.
- CBS 17 had the highest number of viewers at noon, and gained in afternoon newscasts.
There have been some big shakeups at Triangle television news stations this year.
WRAL lost multiple longtime anchors and reporters. ABC11 started the year without an anchor who had spent decades at the station. CBS 17 began 2025 with a different news director.
Through it all, the stations have worked to attract and keep audiences — with mixed results.
The News & Observer analyzed two six-month periods of Nielsen data and found that many daily newscasts drew more total viewers in January-July 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. But that isn’t the case for every time slot. During the 6 p.m. newscast, which gets the biggest audiences of all daily newscasts in the Triangle, only one station saw an increase in viewers from year to year.
Why do ratings matter?
Television viewers may not be aware of how many people are tuning in to local newscasts. But stations carefully track this information, and it can affect broadcasts, said C.A. Tuggle, a distinguished professor at the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill.
With higher ratings, stations can charge more for advertising, Tuggle said. That’s more money that can be spent on staff or equipment, providing an enhanced newscast for viewers.
“The ratings are important, and it should be important to everybody in the news station because, again, good ratings means continued employment,” Tuggle said. “But I think what gets overlooked when you concentrate on the ratings is, why do people watch us, and what would make more of them watch us? That’s what you have to try to figure out.”
Stations also use ratings to help determine what viewers are interested in, Mike Friedrich, the news director at WRAL and Fox 50, told The News & Observer in an interview.
“The ratings and what we see in the metros we get online and whatnot, they give us a good indication of what people are caring about, and then we can just do our jobs to best serve the community the best that we can,” Friedrich said.
While there are several companies that provide ratings data, Nielsen remains the industry standard.
Nielsen gathers data from panels and surveys, partnering with representative households to sample and learn about what people are watching. It also uses data from cable or satellite set-top boxes and internet-connected smart TVs that identify what people are watching.
The data doesn’t, however, keep track of how many people are visiting a news station’s website or streaming its content. And those numbers can be multiples higher than traditional TV viewers. WRAL, for example, said 4.3 million users visited its website in July 2025. In August, ABC11 was within the top 10 local news properties across the country in terms of total hours watched on streaming, Comscore data showed.
The Nielsen data analyzed by The N&O was shared by ABC11 and covered weekday broadcasts January-July 2024 and January-July 2025.
Most-watched morning newscast
ABC11, or WTVD, drew the most viewers during the 4:30 a.m., 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. newscasts, according to the Nielsen data. However, during each of these times, WRAL and Fox 50 (WRAZ) broadcast the same show. And combined, WRAL and Fox 50’s viewers exceed those watching ABC’s Eyewitness News during those three morning newscasts.
The Disney-owned ABC station increased its viewers and market share for the three newscasts year-over-year, while WRAL and Fox 50 lost viewers, the data shows. CBS 17 lost viewers at 4:30 a.m. but gained in the later two slots.
ABC11 works to create trust with viewers through its news coverage, general manager and station president Rob Elmore told The News & Observer in a phone interview.
“There’s no magic to improving the ratings,” Elmore said. “Really, what we strive to do is just serve our viewers and stay on top of the very busy news cycle, make sure that we’re representing and reflecting this very diverse and growing area to the best of our ability, and alerting people when appropriate to something that we think they should know about — whether that’s a big breaking news story or severe weather.”
The emphasis on local news is one of CBS 17’s main strategies to gain and keep viewers, station vice president and general manager Johnny Lewis told The N&O in a phone interview.
“We have done a lot of research, as I’m sure the other stations have as well, as to what the community is looking for, what the viewers are looking for, and they really want local news reported that’s fair and accurate,” Lewis said.
From 7-10 a.m. and 11 a.m.-noon, Fox 50 has a newscast, but the other channels don’t. ABC11 is the only station broadcasting local news during the 10-11 a.m. hour.
Most-watched noon and afternoon newscasts
Tuggle said CBS 17 has a “pretty good” newscast, but “they’re just not attracting the viewers,” a trend that has kept the Nexstar station behind WRAL and ABC11 in the ratings for years.
But CBS 17 has started to make inroads.
The station gained viewers at the noon, 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. newscasts, a growth Lewis described as having occurred “substantially.”
“We feel like we’re sticking with our mantra, that is, ‘local news that matters,’” he said.
CBS 17 had the highest number of viewers among the four stations at noon, a time slot in which ABC11 and WRAL lost viewers year over year.
“This station was not consistent prior to a lot of our management team and us getting here about five years ago in ‘20, during COVID, and so we’ve been real consistent since then, and it’s really paid off well,” Lewis said.
WRAL led at 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., though it lost viewers in the latter.
“Television is a giant megaphone that we care passionately about,” Friedrich said. “But I also care passionately about every single platform, from the first push alert that we send at 4:30 in the morning to the last push alert that we send for our 11 o’clock news, everything in between, what we do for our radio stations and what we do for our social media platforms.”
Most-watched evening newscasts
WRAL held a solid lead at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Based on the Nielsen data, more Triangle viewers watched the 6 p.m. newscast than any other time. But two stations, ABC11 and CBS 17, lost viewers year-over-year. WRAL gained viewers, but not as many as the other two stations lost.
At 11 p.m., ABC11 gained, while WRAL and CBS 17 lost viewers year-over-year, according to the data.
Most of the evening hours are reserved for national programming. At 7 p.m., only CBS 17 and WRAL broadcast local news.
Do anchor shakeups affect viewership?
Stations aren’t shy about promoting their on-air talent, and when there’s a change in leadership or on-air journalists, stations sometimes send out news releases to publicize it.
Debra Morgan had anchored WRAL evening newscasts for more than 30 years when she left in May, and the locally owned Capitol Broadcasting Co. station ran special segments and stories to commemorate her decades there. When ABC11’s John Clark left the station after 32 years, his longtime co-anchor Barbara Gibbs interviewed him about his tenure.
Lewis, the CBS 17 general manager, said anchors and reporters are important to viewers, because they are who viewers see every day, but their departures or arrivals will not necessarily cause viewers to change the channel.
“You have a lot of people moving to Raleigh that don’t know any of the stations,” Lewis said. “So they do a lot of searching. They do a lot of testing to see who they like, and once they find something they like, like a station that reports on local, then they go to that, and they pretty much stay with it, unless something else happens that they don’t like.”
Elmore, of ABC11, agreed that the on-air talent at ABC11 help drive viewership, along with the station’s news coverage.
“We do have, across all day parts, a very experienced and well-known group of anchors and reporters, some of whom have been here two plus decades,” Elmore said. “And I think that is a competitive advantage for us.”
WRAL has some “significant anchors” who do more than just read the news, Friedrich said, citing “In Depth with Dan Haggerty” as a brand that has been developed over the past several years.
But Friedrich emphasized that everyone at WRAL plays a role in developing trust between viewers and the station.
“Four members of my assignment desk have 55 years combined experience. Between my senior producers and executive producers, I have four people with combined 90 years of experience, and I do think that’s part of our secret sauce,” Friedrich said. “It’s not just the people in front of the camera, but also the people behind the scenes.”
