TV Ratings: Fox News Leads Trump Verdict Coverage

More people watched the guilty verdicts in former President Donald Trump’s porn-star hush-money election-interference trial on Fox News Channel than any other cable or broadcast outlet.

According to NextTV.com citing early data Nielsen provided by Fox News, the network had more than 4.4 million viewers tuned in during the 5 p.m. (ET) hour, when the jury’s decision was read in court.

MSNBC had 3.4 million viewers and CNN had nearly 2.4 million viewers.

The NYTimes reportsreports Fox News scored the biggest audience for breaking coverage of the 34 guilty counts, pulling in 4.7 million viewers from 5 to 6 p.m., according to Nielsen. That is a huge viewership for a weekday afternoon and easily outstripped the audiences for CNN, MSNBC and the broadcast networks that cut into regular programming with special reports.

By the evening, after word of the verdict had spread, viewership surged for MSNBC. In an exceedingly rare prime-time victory, the left-leaning channel outranked Fox News, the perennial No. 1 cable news station, in both total viewers and adults ages 25 to 54, the most important demographic for advertisers.

On broadcast, from just before 5 p.m., when the networks broke into regular programming because verdicts had been reached, ABC News had 3.3 million viewers for 102 minutes of coverage and CBS News had 2.5 million viewers tune in for 71 minutes of coverage. Viewing data on NBC viewership was not available.

Fox News Media’s digital properties notched triple- and double-digit increases versus their 2024 weekday average and delivered their highest level of engagement of the year, according to Adobe Analytics.