“NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” holds a 1.3 million viewer lead on “ABC World News with Diane Sawyer” which has a 1.2 million viewer lead on the “CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley.”

Compared to the same week last year all three broadcasts are down in younger viewers and only the “CBS Evening News” grew in Total Viewers: +2%. The Friday of the week of March 7, 2011 saw the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Numbers for the week of March 5, 2012:

	NBC	ABC	CBS
• Total Viewers:	8,897,000	7,549,000	6,307,000
• A25-54:	2,458,000	2,034,000	1,700,000

Launch a Facebook marketing strategy and measure results over six weeks in Mediabistro’s Facebook Marketing Boot Camp. The online conference and workshop, starting April 24, will feature speakers including Current Media’s Evan James Andrews (left), Ogilvy’s Geoffrey Colon, and Starworks Group’s Emily Las.  Register now.

Vinnie Malhotra has been named senior vice president of development and acquisitions at CNN, managing editor Mark Whitaker announced today.

Malhotra began his career at ABC News in 1997. He worked on “Nightline” and “World News Tonight,” where he was a producer for Peter Jennings for three years. Malhotra was part of the ABC News convoy in Iraq when Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, were hit by an IED in 2006.

Since 2010, Malhotra has been ESPN’s vice president and executive producer for content development.

Malhotra will be based in Los Angeles, where he will “pursue development opportunities with outside production companies on behalf of the various networks of CNN Worldwide.”

CNN’s full release is after the jump.

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The HBO movie “Game Change” drew 2.1 million viewers Saturday night at 9 PM, making it the most watched HBO original movie in eight years. That does not include replays, which boosted the viewership even higher. Over the course of the entire weekend “Game Change was viewed by 3.6 million viewers.

The film is a dramatization of the 2008 Presidential election, focusing heavily on the relationship between Sarah Palin (who is now a Fox News contributor) and John McCain, as well as their team of advisers.

The numbers are great for HBO, though when compared to broadcast TV, they may seem relatively small. CBS’ “48 Hours Mystery,” which aired at 10 PM Saturday, drew five million viewers. Because HBO is a subscription service that does not have commercials, the measure of success is very different than traditional broadcast or cable TV. Replays are nearly as important as the original airing.

The last HBO original movie to garner higher numbers was 2004′s “Something the Lord Made.”

Last month we noted that Politico was looking to revive “Politico TV,” its TV news effort. Last week on Super Tuesday it quietly launched that effort, courtesy of C-SPAN, and it is coming back tonight.

The end result looks a lot like your typical TV election coverage, but more raw, and also more insidery. The Baltimore Sun‘s David Zurawik explains:

When I got home, I watched Politico on C-SPAN, and thought I had died and gone to a heaven where television provided smart, savvy, real, semi-raw election night coverage again — like CBS News in the glory years but without anchormen acting pompous or saying crazy faux-folk stuff that only people in Texas were supposed to understand.

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One of the few people in the room with pop star Whitney Houston when she died is apparently cashing in on her death. Houston’s hairstylist Tiffanie Dixon was there when the singer was found in the bathtub Saturday February 11. On Friday, Dixon spoke to both NBC’s “Today” and “Dateline”… for a price of course.

NBC News licensed photos from Dixon, and featured them both on both shows along with two interviews: Tamron Hall on “Dateline” and Ann Curry live on “Today.” Staffers at both ABC News and CBS News confirmed to TVNewser that those networks had been offered the photos and interview, for a fee, and passed.

As TVNewser has covered over and over again, news organizations routinely “pay” for interviews by licensing photos, videos or other materials from potential subjects. Other times, when someone has a book to sell, they will guarantee placement on certain shows, or on dedicated primetime specials.

It is not immediately clear how much NBC licensed the photos for, but typical fees range from $10,000-$20,000. Hall mentioned that NBC had licensed the photos when they appeared onscreen during both “Today” and “Dateline.”

WATCH the “Today” piece:

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As the Girl Scouts of the USA celebrates its 100th anniversary, we’re finding out which  tvnewsers once were Scouts themselves.

The girl pictured at right?  Yup, it’s Katie Couric, who tells ABC News online of having competed for the ‘Most Creative Dish’ award at a troop cookout.  Despite the steak sandwich she whipped up, she lost out, “much to my chagrin”.

The lesson she learned? “Sometimes life isn’t fair. It can be tougher to swallow than a steak sandwich, but that’s the way the hoagie roll crumbles.”

PBS’ Judy Woodruff also was a Scout, for about nine years. “It broadened my horizons in an important way,” she says, “and I’ll always be grateful to the Girl Scouts for that.”

FishbowlDC scoops that Roland Martin‘s suspension from CNN has been lifted.

Martin, a CNN contributor, has been off the air since early February following a series of Tweets that some say were homophobic.

Martin has been spending much of his time off CNN on Twitter. This afternoon he’s been Tweeting about Tweeting about the case of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black Miami teenager who was shot and killed by a white crime watch volunteer in an Orlando-area gated community on Feb. 26. Outrage is growing because the police chief in Sanford, FL held a news conference today saying they do not have enough evidence to charge the shooter, who is white.

While the case has been getting a lot of media attention in the Orlando and Miami markets, the cable news networks have not covered it much. To date, HLN has spent the most time reporting it.

25-54 demographic (Live +SD)

• Total day: FNC: 310 | MSNBC: 170 | CNN: 87 | HLN: 84

• Primetime: FNC: 484 | MSNBC: 237 | CNN: 116 | HLN: 85

	5p:	6p:	7p:	8p:	9p:	10p:	11p:	12a:
FNC	TheFive:	Baier:	Shep:	O’Reilly:	Hannity:	Greta:	O’Reilly:	Hannity:
	353	370	397	607	468	370	350	322
MSNBC	Matthews:	Sharpton:	Matthews:	EdShow:	Maddow:	Lockup:	Lockup:	Lockup:
	167	220	225	183	297	231	262	258
CNN	Blitzer:	KingUSA:	Burnett:	Cooper:	Morgan:	Cooper:	Burnett:	Morgan:
	57	82	67	109	127	112	115	77
HLN	Special:	Prime:	VelezMitchell:	Grace:	DrDrew:	Grace:	Showbiz:	DrDrew:
	39	66	73	122	81	58	100	85

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• Sunday’s installment of OWN’s “Oprah’s Next Chapter featured the biggest “get” yet for the network, with Oprah interviewing Whitney Houston‘s daughter Bobbi Kristina. The scoop also scored in the ratings, with OWN garnering 3.5 million viewers for the program more than twice as many that tuned in for the previous ratings record-holder, an interview with preacher Joel Osteen

• ABC’s Diane Sawyer has an exclusive follow-up interview with Jaycee Dugard, the girl who was kidnapped as a child and kept in captivity for 18 years. Sawyer interviewed Dugard last Summer in a two-hour primetime special. The new interview will air tomorrow on “ABC World News,” and on other ABC News platforms. Dugard will talk about what she is doing now.

• Fox News has ordered a pair of primetime special featuring radio personality Mancow Muller. The specials will air March 17 and 24, with a focus on–of course–politics. The shows will be taped in front of a live studio audience in New York.

CNBC has tapped Kevin Krim as its new GM of digital, reporting directly to CNBC president Mark Hoffman. Krim joins CNBC from Bloomberg, where he had been global head of digital, overseeing Bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek.com, among other sites.

In a note to staff, Hoffman notes that CNBC has been expanding its digital offering in recent years, adding mobile apps and new products, like the subscription CNBC Pro.

“Our digital businesses have matured to a point where we need a Digital General Manager to develop and execute a cohesive digital strategy that will take CNBC to the next level,” Hoffman wrote.

The addition of Krim will result in a management realignment. Details on that in Hoffman’s note, after the jump.

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