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The other election battle: CNN edges Fox (kinda) … MSNBC a distant 3rd.

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According to Ad Age …

CNN Narrowly Wins Cable News Ratings Race on Election Night

For the time period 7 p.m. until 2 a.m.

  • CNN  … 8.8 million viewers
  • Fox News  … close second with 8.7 million viewers.
  • MSNBC … distant 3rd with 4.6 million .

For prime time 8 p.m. through 11 p.m.

  • Fox won … averaged 11.5 million viewers …  its highest prime-time viewership in history.
  • Fox  …  only cable news network with an increase in viewership from the 2008 election ( 9 million viewers)
  • CNN …  9.3 million prime-time viewers, 25% fewer than in 2008
  • MSNBC …  4.7 million prime-time viewers, down 21% from 2008.

Peak viewership 11 p.m. hour

  • CNN …  10.8 million
  • Fox …10.1 million

Technical point: Fox was triple feeding some parts of the night to Fox Business and Fox Network

Interesting point: Obama cruised, but MSNBC only got about 20% of the CNN-FOX-MSNBC pool of voters.  I would have expected that to be way higher.

This entry was posted on November 9, 2012 at 6:41 am and is filed under 2012 Campaign, Media - Ratings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “The other election battle: CNN edges Fox (kinda) … MSNBC a distant 3rd.”

  1. John Carpenter's avatar John Carpenter Says:
    November 9, 2012 at 9:50 am | Reply

    Just a thought, Fox was going crazy with their broadcast, especially when Carl Rowe started talking. I got tweets from lots of my Obama fan friends to check it out. I believe Fox got a higher rating not because people were interested in accurate coverage, but because of how they were managing obvious disappointment and their tendency to “dramatic”. Obama fans were getting kick out of it. Like Tom Hanks mentioned in an interview the next day, the news programs are show business these days, not news. I get my news from the internet.

  2. Kate's avatar Kate Says:
    November 9, 2012 at 4:38 pm | Reply

    We all got tweets and texts telling us to turn on FOX because of the Rove reaction. I have to say, it was more entertaining than any other network. Clearly however, not many Americans agree with the FOX viewpoint or the race would’ve been closer. MSNBC was boring. They’ve gotten use to criticizing and pretty much just had “cat ate the cream” grins all night. I flipped between the 3, more time on CNN and FOX, as they were more interesting.

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