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WASHINGTON -- ABC News's "Nightline" once again will read the names and show photographs of the hundreds of U.S. servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past year in a broadcast called "The Fallen."

Unlike last year, "Nightline" will air the names and faces on Memorial Day.

Last year it aired the broadcast a few days earlier, which put it in the May ratings race.

The May sweeps, like those in November and February, are when viewer levels are closely watched to set advertising rates for TV stations.

Memorial Day, on the other hand, does not fall in the important ratings period; it also traditionally is a day of very low television viewing.

Last year, when "Nightline" announced "The Fallen" would air on a day that was during the sweeps period, the news program was coming off its weakest February sweeps in more than a decade, both in total viewers and among the 25-to-54-year-olds who are the currency of news programming.

Last year the "Nightline" folks insisted that the May sweeps airdate was purely coincidental and that they did not expect a lot of people to watch the show.

Baltimore County-based Sinclair Broadcast Group, the country's largest owner of television stations, tried to help them out with that, ordering its eight ABC affiliate stations not to carry the "Nightline" broadcast. Sinclair said at the time in a statement that "the action appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."

Which was just silly but, nonetheless, caused an outbreak of harrumphing among the talking heads on the cable news networks and writers on op-ed pages.

Despite Sinclair's best efforts, "The Fallen" last year scored nearly 30 percent more viewers than "Nightline" had the rest of that week and about a quarter more viewers than "Nightline" did the previous Friday in the metered television markets. In fact, it clocked the biggest metered-market rating for "Nightline" during a May sweeps since 2002.

This year, a source within the Sinclair organization, who insisted on anonymity, told The Post's John Maynard that the stations have been told by the parent company that they may run "The Fallen" "because the reading of the names coincides with Memorial Day."

Last year, "Nightline" host Ted Koppel noted in the announcement about "The Fallen" that Memorial Day might have been "the most logical occasion" on which to air such a special.

"But," he added, "we felt that the impact would actually be greater on a day when the entire nation is not focused on war dead."

This year, they went with "logical."

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