Posted on 07/23/2016 6:34:12 AM PDT by usafa92
The Republican National Convention clearly reached its crescendo on Thursday night. The four-day run-up until Donald Trump's accepting of the nomination, while giving a strong ratings performance, did not bring any atypical highs for the political meetup. Trump's speech didn't change that narrative by much.
With all three broadcast networks and cable news networks now tallied for the 10 p.m. hour, it appears just over 32 million viewers tuned into Trump's extended time on stage.
On the broadcast networks alone Thursday night, Trump's time on the stage brought in 12.3 million viewers to the 10 o'clock hour on through the speech's conclusion at 11:37 p.m. ET. NBC News led its fourth and final night of primetime coverage with an average 4.6 million viewers tuning in, per Nielsen Media's Fast Affiliate ratings. ABC News, which preciously topped CBS on Monday, averaged 3.9 million viewers. CBS News took 3.8 million viewers. Spanish-language net Univision contributed another 1.3 million viewers.
Cable news brought the biggest lifts — particularly for Fox News Channel and CNN. FNC, a favorite for right-leaning audiences, topped them all with 9.4 million viewers. And CNN, hitting an all-time high for its RNC coverage, also topped all of the broadcast networks with 5.5 million viewers. MSNBC, trailing, averaged 2.95 million viewers. (Nielsen's delivery of the 32-million stat also includes Fox Business Network, CNBC and NBC Universo.)
Prior to Thursday, the broadcast networks have been contributing in the area of 10 million viewers to gross RNC ratings. The cable news aggregate typically topped that showing by a million-or-so viewers. High ratings have certainly the candidate's mind. His latest tweet, as of Friday morning, crowed about the RNC ratings. But it is now clear his ratings record-breaking is limited to debate appearances.
To prove to be a bigger draw than RNC headliners of the recent past, Trump's final tally would need to be higher than 30.3 million to top Mitt Romney in 2012. The candidate already has that in the bag. But with nearly 40 million viewers tuning into John McCain in 2008, that showing will not be matched.
The TV race in the key news demographic of adults 25-54 saw rankings for total viewership hold. FNC (2.5 million) and CNN (1.9 million) topped them all, with NBC News (1.8 million) leading broadcast coverage. ABC (1.4 million), CBS (1.2 million) and MSNBC (927,000) followed.
Prior to Thursday, the 2016 RNC had been averaging 22 million viewers across eight ad-supported networks. That number is off a little, given the 1 million or so watching on PBS and a few other nets each night, but pretty accurate. And tracking down from 2008.
Very good point. But today's media will use anything, anything at all, no matter how feeble the evidence, or glaring the pretext, to disparage Trump. Thank heavens we have the Internet.
An apples: oranges comparison. They will also make a big deal of Hillary’s audience not coming near Obama’s, right? Sure they will.
People are getting wise to even FoxNews.and are no longer watching these events from media outlets
Ditto
I watched on C SPAN to avoid the constant propaganda.
I watched the RNC feed on Youtube. No crap from the crooks in the media.
Yup , c-span and YouTube .
I’m guessing that adding CSPN, PBS, youtube and other streaming sites, that he got about the same as McCain and 0bama in 2008, both of whom drew about 38 MILLION.
Watched on cspan,don’t known if that is counted
As we have seen with the Wikileaks emails from the DNC and liberal media, they will do what they have to to make Hillary look great. So I expect they will count CSPAN numbers, Youtube viewers, those sitting in prison, dogs and cats, anything they can do to make her numbers look better than they really are. I mean, they were ready to start challenging Bernie’s Jewish heritage, so they will do anything.
I watched it on Directv channel 347. Gavel to gavel. No commercials or commentators.
the only reason why mccain’s convention speech had so many viewers was because of palin
Wasn’t the music great? CSPAN was the only network that gave full time to the band.
I watched it on CSPAN. The first night I watched other channels but moved to CSPAN after they did not show the crime victim speakers and others. I also got tired of the talking heads very quickly.
Is there a way to compile the live stream viewers? I would guess it would be several million.
I watched it on the ABC raw stream on my Roku, totally sans chattyheads.
It was excellent ... and uncounted in this farce of a survey. McCain? Really?
I only watched the last half of Trump’s speech on NBC because it was the first channel I landed on that bad it. What a big mistake...Trump had barely left the podium when Brokaw said “It was a dark speech.” I immediately flipped to CSPAN. I had forgotten how miserable the MSM talking heads are. Watched some other speech highlights on the web.
Now you don't want the media to give Donald any real credit. They have their orders.
Most of the people I know watched it on their computers as I did. Regular network and even cable television is becoming obsolete. I hardly watch anything on TV. I love baseball and football, but I watch almost every game now on the MLB, NFL, and ESPN apps rather than TV. As for Trump’s acceptance speech if you throw in computer viewers along with those who watched network and cable TV I think it will set a record for viewership for a political convention.
I didn’t watch any of it on TV. I watched highlights after the fact; saw the important bits and saved a lot of time.
All because of Sarah! John McNuts just happened to be on the top of the ticket! Shame!
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