When the news broke around 3:15pmET yesterday of the massacre at Ft. Hood, the 24-hour news networks went in to high gear. A day later, we have the ratings which show where TV viewers went for information.
Between 3pmET and 7pmET, Fox News averaged 2.60M Total Viewers and 627K in A25-54 viewers coming in first of the three cable news networks, and adding viewers with each subsequent hour. CNN averaged 1.33M Total Viewers and 371K in the demo, seeing some drop-off at 6pmET. MSNBC averaged 624K Total Viewers and 196K in the demo, like FOX adding viewers with each hour.
> More: The Fox News dominance of the story was even more profound in primetime, as the network averaged 3.24M Total Viewers between 8pmET and MidnightET, with Bill O’Reilly drawing 4.995 million Total Viewers at 8pmET (by comparison NBC’s “Parks & Recreation” at 8:30 averaged 4.935M).
Fox News beat the combined Total Viewer averages of CNN (1.835M) and MSNBC (955K) from 8pmET-Midnight.