Up to 25 million tuned in to the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings

An emotionally fraught hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday had Americans riveted to their TV sets and mobile devices. Millions of people huddled around their screen of choice for what at times seemed like a nine-hour inquisition into the heart and soul of the nation. While a delay in Nielsen's processing of the broadcast ratings and an imprecise reckoning of the streaming numbers leaves us with only a murky impression of the audience for Thursday's proceedings, the data that is currently available suggests that tens of millions of Americans watched at least part of the hearings. In terms of the overall TV deliveries, the preliminary ratings indicate that nearly 20 percent of all TVs that were in use between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. were tuned in to the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the broadcast and cable networks. According to Nielsen overnight data from the 56 metered local TV markets, the marathon session averaged a 16.2 household rating, which upon the addition of the remaining media markets and the requisite adjustments needed to derive the final live-same-day data, should work out to an average TV audience of around 25 million to 26 million total viewers across NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC. Note that those preliminary estimates do not include any projections for out-of-home viewing or digital streaming, both of which are almost certain to be considerable. As far as the final data that has been crunched by Nielsen, Fox News Channel enjoyed the biggest lift Thursday, averaging 5.69 million viewers over the span of the hearings, a number that topped the combined deliveries of MSNBC (2.9 million) and CNN (2.5 million). Fox News also scared up the most viewers in the all-important news demo, although that race was markedly tighter. FNC during the nine-hour programming block averaged 1.1 million adults 25-54, besting CNN (763,000) and MSNBC (464,000). The discrepancy between CNN and MSNBC's overall deliveries and their demo penetration is a function of the latter's grayer audience. Last year, the median age of the primetime CNN viewer was just shy of 60 years old, a few spins around the sun shy of MSNBC's 65 years. All told, the average delivery for the three cable new networks across the nine-hour block was 11.1 million viewers. Some 9.8 million viewers watched Dr. Blasey Ford's early testimony via cable news, while Kavanaugh's afternoon session drew 13.1 million viewers. Fox News, which dominated both segments, put up particularly elevated numbers when Kavanaugh was on the screen, averaging 7.17 million viewers to MSNBC's 3.18 million and CNN's 2.78 million. The available digital data isn't exactly comparable to the traditional TV numbers, inasmuch as the streaming deliveries weren't broken down by an average-minute audience. Bearing that in mind, CNN dominated in the raw live-streaming numbers, serving up 8.2 million live starts via its app and online. The Fox News digital platforms delivered north of 3 million live starts, while NBC News did not break out the number of starts for MSNBC.com and its app. (The combined live starts across all NBC News digital platforms added up to around 3.5 million.) As much as it's interesting to speculate about how the Blasey Ford-Kavanaugh hearings stacked up to Anita Hill's October 1991 testimony against Clarence Thomas, it's difficult to make a case for a head-to-head comparison. For one thing, the Hill-Thomas hearings went on for three days; for another, at the time of the earlier series of events, the coverage was limited to the three broadcast news organizations, cable trailblazer CNN and its sibling net Headline News. Perhaps more importantly, the Internet as we now know it literally did not exist when Hill made her case in D.C. Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser was made available to the public just two months before the Hill-Thomas hearings, which means that there were very few non-academics/civilians online, and zero in the way of digital news resources.

Up to 25 million tuned in to the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings

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