NBC's Meet the Press is sloooowly dipping in ratings since the death of host Tim Russert. The station was beaten out by CBS's Face the Nation last month, barely ahead of ABC's This Week.

The question isn't: Why is MTP falling, since the answer is obvious: Russert was Meet the Press. The question is, why did it take so long?

Logic dictates that after Russert died and the initial interest in who was going to take his seat wore off (Brokaw gets it for now, David Gregory soon, Olbermann/Matthews never), the show would plummet quickly without the unique spark and history that Russert brought to the program. But instead it's been a slow, gentle letdown from the #1 spot.

So what's the deal? Is there such a thing as sympathy ratings, or schadenfreude ratings, where viewers will tune in reverence to the late Russert, or in sadistic pleasure in watching the NBC show flounder?

In all likeliness, the slow drop is due to viewers slowly breaking their viewing habits:
"[It's] not so much to switch loyalty definitively," (news analyst Andrew Tyndall) says, "but to experiment and to revisit rival programs they may have once seen - and since abandoned."