About 14 million people watched prison-bound Michael Cohen testify that his former boss President Donald Trump is racist, a conman and a cheat, and warn that if he loses in 2020 there will “never be a peaceful transition.”
That’s how many people watched him testify before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday across ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News Channel. It does not include data on other TV outlets su
ch as C-Span etc, nor does it include the testimony’s considerable audience watching via various livestreams.
Cohen’s numbers will go up; NBC broadcast coverage data was not available as of writing.
Among networks reporting in early Nielsen data, ABC clocked the largest crowd. About 3.097M ABC viewers watched Cohen warn
Republicans throwing spitballs at him for being there in the first place that if they continue to blindly follow Trump like he did they are “going to suffer the same consequences that I am suffering. Look at what happened to me.”
ABC was followed closely by CBS’s 3.050M.
The gap between broadcast and cable news networks was slim.
MNBC logged the largest cable news crowd.
About 2.8M viewers watched committee Republicans blast Cohen for considering movie, TV or book deals about his experience on that Comcast cable network.
Another 2.4M caught one committee member tell Cohen “Liar, liar, pants on fire” via Fox News Channel.
CNN averaged 2.2M viewers who caught the hearings’ wild Whose A Racist exchange between committee members Mark Meadows and Rashida Tlaib.
But CNN logged the largest crowd among cable newsers in the 25-54 age bracket that is the currency of TV news sales.
ABC, however, logged 760K in the age bracket, and CBS averaged 666K, besting CNN.
ABC’s numbers may be higher than competitors in part because its news coverage wrapped at 3 PM when the committee
took a break. Data for the other networks runs through 5:15 PM, when the hearing wrapped.
After the testimony, and with President Trump’s summit in North Korea unraveled, Fox News Channel dominated primetime punditry, averaging 3.447M viewers, besting MSNBC’s 3.137M and CNN’s 1.788M.
Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show was most watched among cable news networks, in both metrics, averaging 3.839M viewers and 818K in the news demo
FNC’s primetime was topped by Hannity, which clocked 3.705 million total viewers and 698K in the demo.
Maddow and Sean Hannity, who is in Hanoi, where he had traveled for Trump’s second summit with North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un, also beat ABC’s Schooled (3.5 million) in total viewers.
MSNBC had the edge on the news demo in primetime, 645K viewers to FNC’s 629K and CNN’s 5.77K.
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