During Height of Saturday’s Storms, Viewers Turn to The Weather Channel

As tornadoes bore down on South and North Carolina Saturday afternoon, part of a three-day, multi-state series of storms, cable news viewers began turning on The Weather Channel. For total day viewing The Weather Channel (200K) topped FNC (196K), MSNBC (175K) and CNN (169K) in younger viewers and came in second to Fox News (928K) in Total Viewers.

Fox News was first in the ratings for much of the afternoon, with TWC in second. But by 4pmET, as tornadoes had already ripped through Mississippi and Alabama and were now touching down in South and North Carolina, TWC pulled ahead. The averages from 4-6pmET:

From 6-8pmET, as the tornadoes continued to move North and East and the aftermath of the earlier storms was sinking in, Fox News took the top spot, followed by TWC and CNN. The three channels were updating the storms throughout the afternoon during live coverage. MSNBC produced bottom-of-the-hour cut-ins during taped programming.