According to Nielsen, 13 networks carried President Obama's speech live. CBS was the most-watched broadcast network with an average 7.6 million viewers, followed by NBC with 7 million and ABC with 5.6 million. On cable, Fox News Channel was the leader with 4.7 million viewers. MSNBC averaged 2.3 million, while CNN had 2.1 million.
33.3 Million Watched State Of The Union
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The audience of 33.3 million people for President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address fell just short of last year’s, ranking as his least-watched.
Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address drew 33.5 million viewers.
Viewership was down sharply from Obama’s largest audience, the 52 million people who tuned in to see his first address in 2009.
According to the Nielsen Co., 13 networks carried the speech live. CBS was the most-watched broadcast network with an average 7.6 million viewers, followed by NBC with 7 million and ABC with 5.6 million.
On cable, Fox News Channel was the leader with 4.7 million viewers. MSNBC averaged 2.3 million, while CNN was in third place with 2.1 million.
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Comments (3)
Ellen Samrock says:
January 30, 2014 at 11:50 am
CBS can crow that it had the highest ratings of all the networks that night but Nielsen numbers indicate that, overall, Obama’s SOTU was the least watched of such presidential addresses in twenty years (only Clinton’s 2000 SOTU address was lower). Americans have lost confidence in this president. In my case, I watched re-runs of “The Larry Sanders Show” free on Crackle during the president’s speech.
Keith ONeal says:
January 30, 2014 at 3:57 pm
I skipped the SOTU address as well. I went to the radio instead and listened to another Orlando Magic loss.
Wagner Pereira says:
January 30, 2014 at 4:38 pm
Another example of ABC’s emphasis on “soft news” impacting tune in for true news events in TOTAL viewers. More interesting is the difference in P18-49, showing how old the CBS News Viewer truly is. At 9PM, The State of the Union Address earned a 1.1 on ABC (down a tenth from last year’s 1.2) , 1.3 on CBS (up from last year’s 1.1), 1.4 on NBC (down from last year’s 1.6) and 1.0 on FOX (up from last year’s 0.9). And ABC was almost down to the “big Fox Network” number which has no Network News Programming every night. While “soft news” may win more females for ABC, it is clearly having an impact on their News Image.