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Fox News Channel led the pack in primetime election coverage Tuesday night with 9.8M tuning in from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET, according to early data from Nielsen.
However, this is a sharp decrease from the audience FNC drew in 2020, when nearly 14M watched, which seems to be the story across the board, as all linear TV channels struggled to capture as large of an audience as they did four years ago.
Nielsen hasn’t released its final numbers, which will detail just how many U.S. viewers watched Election Night coverage across nearly two dozen linear networks. These numbers are based on early, in-home viewing data and are likely to go up across the board when Nielsen’s final numbers, which take out-of-home viewing into account, are available later Wednesday. This post will be updated when that data is available.
Following Fox News, it was a tug of war between broadcast and cable, as ABC was the No. 1 broadcaster of the night with about 5.6M viewers in primetime. It was the first time in 16 years that ABC not only led broadcast in total viewers, but also among both adults 18-49 (1.8M) and 25-54 (2.2M).
Meanwhile, MSNBC drew 5.5M viewers, topping CNN on a presidential election night for the first time in network history. But while they were the cable winner of the night, MSNBC was still down versus 2020’s 7.3M viewers.
CNN was significantly down in linear viewership from 2020, essentially halving its audience with just 4.7M viewers, compared to 9.6M four years ago. It was CNN’s smallest Election Night audience since 1996.
CNN did have a digital and streaming component across CNN.com and Max to election coverage, which would not be accounted for here.
Across the remainder of broadcast, NBC drew 5.3M total viewers in primetime, and CBS got 3.4M. Fox was last with 2.1M — all major decreases from 2020 as well.
As mentioned, this data also doesn’t factor streaming into the equation, and many of the networks had digital components this election cycle. Deadline will also update this post with any internal numbers that are released, though they cannot be as directly compared to one another since they are not independently verifiable.