TV Ratings: Inquiry Hearings Score For Cable News TV

The five days of impeachment hearings were a boon to programmers and accountants at the cable news networks. For the big broadcasters, not so much.

The daytime hearing audience ranged from a high of 13.8 million on opening day to a low of 11 million on the third day, reports The Associated Press citing Nielsen data.

CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC showed every minute of the hearings, even the two times it stretched into the evening. And they were rewarded: Fox (2.5 million viewership average over five days), MSNBC (2.48 million) and CNN (1.68 million) each had more people watching the hearing than would tune in on a typical day. In the cases of MSNBC and CNN, the networks more than doubled their daytime average, Nielsen said.

This interest had residual benefits elsewhere; both the Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson prime-time shows on Fox had their most-watched month ever in November.

The picture is different on the broadcast networks. CBS’ average of 1.82 million viewers for the hearings was better than ABC and NBC, but it was still lower than the 3.3 million people that CBS’ top-rated daytime programming gets on a typical day. While there was time for some commercials during breaks in the hearing, there were far fewer ads than are usually run.

NBC returned to the top of the primetime rankings last week with a strong Sunday night football matchup between Green Bay and San Francisco. The network averaged 7 million viewers for the week, Fox averaged 6.1 million, CBS had 5.9 million, ABC had 4.4 million, Telemundo had 1.5 million, Univision had 1.3 million, ION Television had 1.2 million and the CW had 750,000.

ABC’s “World News Tonight” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.8 million viewers. NBC’s “Nightly News” was second with 8 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 5.6 million viewers.

Fox News Channel was the week’s most popular cable network, averaging 2.92 million viewers in prime time. ESPN had 2.63 million, MSNBC had 2.4 million, Hallmark had 1.59 million and CNN had 1.15 million.

FNC’s morning show Fox & Friends marked 217 months as the No. 1 cable news morning show in total viewers, according to TV Newser.

FNC’s early evening and prime time programming delivered yearly highs for the month of November, and won their respective timeslots. The Five delivered an average of 3 million viewers and 454,000 in the demo, No. 1 in its time slot. Special Report with Bret Baier averaged 2.6 million viewers and 418,000 in the 25-54 demo. The Story with Martha MacCallum at  7 p.m. delivered 2.3 million viewers and 376,000 with A25-54.

At 8 p.m. ET,  Tucker Carlson Tonight delivered its highest-rated month in program history with 3.4 million viewers and 551,000 in the 25-54 category, No. 2 in all of cable news.  At 10 p.m., Laura Ingraham‘s and The Ingraham Angle beat CNN and MSNBC across the board.

On Saturdays, Fox News’ opinion slate of Watters World, Justice with Judge Jeanine and Greg Gutfeld Show won their respective hours across the board. On Sundays, media analysis program MediaBuzz hosted by Howie Kurtz beat the 11 a.m. ET cable news competition in total viewers and adults 25-54.

Trivia titan James Holzhauer won Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions in the session ending Nov.17 and propelled the game show 7% to a new season-high 7.2 live-plus-same-day national Nielsen rating, its highest rating since the week ending June 2.

Meanwhile, most of syndication was flat to down after running into heavy preemptions for the impeachment hearings.