Tough competition keeps everyone sharp and benefits the viewers, he said.
ABC's "World News" has been the most popular newscast for eight straight weeks, and 15 out of the last 19, according to Nielsen Media Research. Katie Couric's "CBS Evening News" is a distant third.
All the attention paid to Couric's tough start at CBS has overshadowed what's been going on at NBC. In Couric's first 39 weeks at CBS, she's lost 287,000 viewers from the average of a year ago, a drop of 4 percent from predecessor Bob Schieffer's audience. At the same time, "Nightly News" lost 533,000 viewers, or 5 percent, Nielsen said.
In Williams's first three months after taking over from Tom Brokaw in December 2004, "Nightly News" averaged 10.79 million viewers. In the past three months, it's been 7.66 million. To be fair, the nightly news audience traditionally drops when warm weather arrives, and it has been a slow news period.
Still, that's a lot of missing viewers.
"If I was at NBC, I'd really be quite nervous about the hundreds of thousands of people that have left my audience," said Andrew Tyndall, a consultant who studies the content of network evening newscasts.
Tyndall credits ABC more than he faults NBC. In a sense, Tyndall said, the loss of audience NBC should have anticipated with Brokaw's departure was delayed for two years because of turmoil at ABC -- the death of Peter Jennings, injury to Bob Woodruff, and the departure of Elizabeth Vargas. With Gibson, now there's stability.
Williams, whose "champagne toasts" comment was a sly reference to bottles passed around ABC's newsroom due to recent ratings triumphs, said he leaves it to others to worry about the ratings numbers.
"I, honest to God, couldn't tell you what the ratings are and couldn't tell you that for days on end," he said. "It really is immaterial in a way. There isn't anything we can do on a given day to tweak."
