John Dickerson Hones His Skills at CBS News

By the standards of Sunday morning news shows, the handoff of the anchor’s position on “Face the Nation” on CBS was really quite peaceful.

A few days after the longtime anchor Bob Schieffer announced his retirement last spring, he was on his show introducing and laughing with his replacement, John Dickerson.

The show’s main competitors haven’t had it that easy. NBC suffered through the drawn-out, somewhat torturous firing of David Gregory, and Christiane Amanpour’s shaky status on ABC’s “This Week” spawned rumors in the media until she was replaced in 2011 after little more than a year in the job.

The NY Times reports the CBS succession plan made sense. Like Schieffer, Dickerson had spent most of his career as a reporter and was widely respected in the beltway. Though much younger, he shared Mr. Schieffer’s calm and cool demeanor (“There was this quality of . . . call it, avuncular,” said David Rhodes, the president of CBS News).

Still, Dickerson, with a print journalism career at publications like Time and Slate, had little television experience and a relatively low public profile. It was something of a risk for CBS to hand him the reins of a show that was No. 1 in viewership among the Sunday morning news programs and that was critical to the network’s credibility in Washington.

NY Times photos

Eight months later, Mr. Dickerson, 47, has not missed a beat. For the season, “Face the Nation” remains the No. 1 most viewed public affairs show on Sundays, with an average of 3.7 million viewers, besting “Meet the Press,” now hosted by Chuck Todd, and “This Week,” led by George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz.

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In its summary of debate winners and losers, The Washington Post deemed Dickerson a "winner" during Saturday's GOP Debate.  According to WaPo, When you have six candidates on stage and at least four of them (Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Bush) actively dislike each other, the moderator is going to be under a ton of pressure. ...Dickerson was outstanding — keeping his wits and humor about him, moving the debate briskly while also allowing disagreements to play out. That performance is how a moderator should aim to act.

TheNYTimes didn't quite see it the same.  "With a smaller group on the stage this time, the moderators handled the remaining candidates gently, and occasionally lingered on an individual contender to press for more specific answers. A moment of tension flared early when John Dickerson of CBS corrected an inaccurate statement by Mr. Cruz, who misstated the year Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Yet, as he has done in every debate so far, Mr. Trump steamrollered over the moderators, seemingly at will, and constantly interrupted and talked over his opponents. As in each previous debate, there was no concerted effort to make him behave."