Jan. 6 Hearing Pulls 17.7M Viewers, MSNBC Posts Best Results
- by Wayne Friedman , July 22, 2022
A special prime-time U.S. House hearing on the January 6 insurrection pulled strong TV viewership -- posting a Nielsen-measured 17.7 million viewers from 10 networks.
The Thursday night event had the highest ratings since the initial hearing on June 9 -- also airing in prime-time -- which pulled in 20 million viewers from 11 networks.
So far, eight hearings have averaged 13.1 million Nielsen-measured viewers.
The bulk of viewership for the most recent hearing came from five networks. MSNBC posted the best result, with 4.88 million, followed by ABC with 3.98 million, CNN at 3.18 million, NBC with 2.69 million and CBS at 2.68 million.
These networks posted a collective 17.4 million Nielsen-measured viewers for a presentation running nearly three hours in the 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. prime-time period -- in addition to pre- and post-hearing analysis on many networks.
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CNBC, CNNe, Fox Business Network, NBCLX and NewsNation were the other networks that made up the remaining viewing audience.
Looking at the key adult 25-54 news viewers, CNN scored the best result, with a 0.66 rating. ABC was at 0.65, followed by NBC with 0.56, MSNBC at 0.53; and CBS with 0.42.
Fox News Channel did not air the hearing. For the three-hour prime-time period -- 8 pm. to 11 p.m ET -- it ran its usual prime-time opinion shows averaging 2.7 million viewers.
Wayne, the "key" news viewers aren't the light news viewing 25-54s but the 55+ group so those stats---the 25-54 averge commercial minute ratings have little meaning.
As for the overall audience picture all Nielsen is reporting as yet is the average minute reach of the hearings as seen on TV sets. The combined reach of all of the hearings , counting all venues and those who watched only protions of each episode must be far greater ---say 55-65% of the adult TV home population---as a guess. I wonder if such information will be made available to provide a clearer picture.