Meet the Press

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Meet the Press is a weekly American television news/interview program produced by NBC. It started as a radio show in 1945 as American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press, created and produced by Lawrence E. Spivak, and first broadcast over the Mutual Broadcasting System.

Meet the Press made its television debut on November 6, 1947. It is now the longest-running television show in worldwide broadcasting history (though episode/airtime-wise SportsCenter has most air time with over 30,000 editions). Meet the Press is the highest rated of the American television Sunday morning talk shows, although its ratings are less than CBS News Sunday Morning, which airs in the same time slot in most markets.

Meet the Press airs in most markets at 9:00 AM ET, with some stations (including WRC-TV in Washington, DC, where this program is produced) delaying the broadcast until later. The show is also repeated Sunday evenings on MSNBC, early Monday morning on NBC as part of the NBC All Night block and is simulcast on radio stations by Westwood One.^[1] It is also available as an audio or video podcast from iTunes.

[edit] History

Meet the Press and similar Sunday-morning interview shows specialize in interviewing national leaders on issues of state, economics and foreign policy. These shows help fulfill the obligations of the networks to provide a public service to the community.

The show was originally presented as a 30-minute press conference with a single guest and a panel of questioners. Its first hostess was Martha Rountree, to date the program's only female moderator. The original producer, Lawrence E. Spivak, who published the conservative political and cultural magazine The American Mercury until 1954, remained on the show as permanent panel member and then as moderator until November 1975.

Other moderators throughout the years have included Ned Brooks, Bill Monroe, Marvin Kalb, Roger Mudd, Chris Wallace and Garrick Utley.

[edit] Current format with Tim Russert

Today, the show's format consists of an extended one-on-one interview with the host, and is sometimes followed by a roundtable discussion or one-on-two interview with figures in adversarial positions, either congressmembers from opposite sides of the aisle or political commentators. NBC's Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, has hosted the show since December 8, 1991, under the full title Meet the Press with Tim Russert. The show expanded to 60 minutes in 1992.

Russert's sign-off is, "That's all for today. We'll be back next week. If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press." During the football season, Russert, a native of Buffalo, New York and avid Buffalo Bills fan,^[2][3] sometimes adds, "Go Bills!", and occasionally will ask panelists, "How 'bout those Sabres?" if the Buffalo NHL hockey team is doing well. Spoofs of the show on Saturday Night Live often reflect this addition.

In the past, the final segment of the program, "The Meet the Press Minute," was devoted to topical clips from the show's extensive archives.

[edit] Moderators

[edit] Ratings

See also: Nielsen Ratings

As of April 2006, Meet the Press has been the number one Sunday-morning interview show for five years straight, beating CBS's Face the Nation, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday, and CNN's Late Edition.^[4] It is the second-highest rated program airing on Sunday morning, behind CBS's CBS News Sunday Morning^[5], which airs in the same time slot in most markets.

[edit] Listen to

• Meet the Press: Martin Luther King (April 17, 1960)

[edit] External links

• 60th anniversary background information

[edit] References

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