Air Strikes Lift CNN Ratings
- by October 11, 2001
From 12:45 p.m. EDT on Sunday, when CNN started covering the bombings, to 11 p.m., CNN averaged a 4.0 rating, which is 67% above its average for the previous three Sundays. For the full week (Oct. 1-7), CNN finished in a dead heat with ESPN for No. 1-rated network for the week, each averaging a 1.9 Nielsen rating.
Fox News Channel, delivering wall-to-wall coverage of the conflict, also pulled in many more viewers than usual on Sunday, averaging a 2.3 rating for the 10-plus hours, a number that lifted the upstart network to the rare heights of a fifth-place tie among all basic-cable networks in both primetime (with Lifetime) and total day (with TBS) for the week of Oct. 1-7.
MSNBC was right behind Fox News for the 10-plus Sunday hours, its 2.2 average rating good for a seventh-place tie (with TNT, ESPN, TNN and A&E) in total day for the week and 12th place in primetime.
By breaking out its Sunday war coverage into discrete 60-minute blocks under the heading "America Strikes Back," CNN peaked from 5 to 6 p.m. EDT with a 4.4 rating. That hour wound up as the second highest-rated program of the week, beaten only by the Panthers-49ers pro-football game on ESPN, which ended up with a below-average 6.2 rating, clearly losing some viewers to the news coverage.
TNN's two-hour primetime wrestling extravaganza on Oct. 1 at 9 p.m. came in third for the week with a 4.4 rating. The rest of the top 10 programs for the week were one-hour blocks of CNN Sunday news coverage.
The highest-rated primetime movie of the week was Sunday's "Money Talks," with Chris Tucker and Charlie Sheen, which averaged a 3.1 rating on TBS from 8 to 10.
In addition to the all-news networks, the one entertainment network that attracted more viewers than the same week a year ago was TNN, which parlayed a five-day "Star Trek: The Next Generation" marathon into a 1. 4 average primetime rating, giving it an eighth-place tie with Nickelodeon/Nick At Nite.
- Variety
