Fox News Gets Big Numbers Covering SOTU

President Donald Trump reached an audience of 45.6 million people for his first State of the Union address, not enough to give him bragging rights over his predecessor.

The Nielsen company said former President Barack Obama drew 48 million people for his first State of the Union in 2010.

Trump’s audience was down from the 47.7 million people who watched his address to the joint session of Congress last February, according to The AP.

With 11.5 million viewers, Fox News Channel was the clear victor among all outlets, cable and broadcast, when it came to POTUS’ first State of the Union. The cable newser also easily beat NBC and the other Big 4 broadcasters in viewers. The Comcast-owned net had 7.1 million viewers ahead by a hair of CBS’ 7 million. ABC and Fox were in the rear-view with 5.4 million and 3.6 million each.

Back on cable and following FNC by a long stretch, CNN was down from Trump’s big Capitol Hill speech of 2017 with 3.1 million viewers in the 9 – 10:30 PM ET slot. Even with the Congressional speech of last year, MSNBC had 2.7 million tuning in for what is one of official Washington DC’s biggest nights, according to Deadline.

Total Vieweers / 25-54 Demo

In what is currently the highest rated SOTU ever for cable news, last night’s speech saw FNC snag 3.3 million viewers in the adults 25-54 demo, that’s greater than the Jeff Zucker-run CNN’s entire viewership. As for CNN, they had 1.3 million in the news demo and MSNBC had 659,000 viewers.

There are numbers from more outlets to come in, but right now Trump’s speech had 40.4 million viewers on the Big 4 and the cable news trio. That’s a small decline from the 42.8 million who watched his 2017 speech on the same seven outlets last February.