Nielsen has revealed the preliminary news about President Obama’s State of the Union address: It garnered an estimated audience of 31.7 million people across 13 cable and broadcast networks - making it the least watched address in the last 15 years. The comparison: Former President Bill Clinton’s finale garnered drew 31.4 million viewers in 2000.
There were winners and losers, however on Tuesday night. Among the Big Three networks, CBS trumped its rivals , drawing an initial 7.3 million viewers at the start, compared to NBC with 5.2 million, and ABC 4.6 million.
Fox News was king in the cable realm. During the same time period, Fox News had 3.5 million viewers, CNN drew 2.4 million and MSNBC just under 2 million. Fox News coverage afterwards that featured analysis by Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly also led the numbers, garnering 3.5 million viewers, Nielsen said. CNN did enjoy a victory among the key 25-to-54-year-old set, pulling in a million from the demographic, compared to 934,168 of the age group who preferred Fox.
Twitter, meanwhile, reveals that some 2.6 million tweets cascaded across its platform during the speech. Vocativ, a technology driven research and media group, also analyzed Mr. Obama’s address using standard readability tests to discover the speech was written “on a 10th grade level.” Find their analysis here
• Jennifer Harper can be reached at jharper@washingtontimes.com.
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