Friday was one of those days during which the business news channels should have scored big — the most powerful and most feared investment bank on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, sued by the federal government.
So how did CNBC do?
Not so good.
The business day (5am-7pmET), which is primetime to CNBC averaged just 46,000 viewers in the A25-54 demo, according to Nielsen. That’s down 4% from the quarter-to-date average. The news broke during “Squawk on the Street” and dominated coverage throughout the day. The 9-11amET program averaged 50K demo viewers.
The most-watched hour of business day was “Street Signs” which averaged 68K. By comparison, MSNBC averaged 59K in the demo at 2pmET, CNN averaged 183K and FNC averaged 244K.
The most watched hour of the entire CNBC line-up on Friday: a re-air of the documentary “Porn: Business of Pleasure”, which drew 178K A25-54 viewers at 10pmET.
Numbers from Bloomberg and FBN are not known as they are not publicly rated.