Sean Hannity Scores Another Cable News Ratings Win, With Rush Limbaugh As Guest

Rush Limbaugh joined forces with Sean Hannity to beat Rachel Maddow on Thursday night.

Fox News Channel’s Hannity finished first among cable news nets at 9 PM ET in total viewers (3.715 million) and in the news demo (800K). MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show delivered 2.549 million viewers and 537K in the age bracket. Hannity also trounced CNN’s AC360, which town-halled its way to a crowd of 970K total viewers – 341,000 of them aged 25-54.

Hannity pulled out all stops with bookings for his first week back in the 9 PM ET time slot. Monday night’s guest, former White House strategist/current Breitbart chief Steve Bannon, followed Tuesday by ousted FNC star Bill O’Reilly, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Limbaugh on Thursday.

Hannity won every night in total viewers and every night (except Ryan’s) in the demo; Maddow tied Hannity on Tuesday in the 25-54 age bracket.

Hannity will take the week in both metrics; through Thursday the FNC star is averaging 3.5M viewers and 713K news-demo viewers, besting Maddow’s 2.7M and 599K, respectively.

Who did it best? Here are nightly results for Hannity’s week of guests:

Steve Bannon: 3.27 million total viewers; 666K news demo viewers

Bill O’Reilly: 3.89M total viewers; 781K in the news demo

Paul Ryan: 3.12M total viewers; 626K in news demo

Rush Limbaugh: 3.72M total viewers; 779K news demo viewers.