An average of 13.9 million viewers watched the opening day of the House impeachment hearings on Wednesday on the ten television networks that broadcast the Democrats’ show trial live, according to Nielsen Media Research.  The big news is that the Fox News channel, generally perceived as the network most friendly to President Trump, not only beat its cable news competition, but also came in first in total viewers even among all of the alphabet broadcast TV networks that pre-empted their regular daytime programming.
At one time, that kind of ratings victory for a cable channel would have been unthinkable.  It’s a measure of the ongoing decline into irrelevance of the country’s seventy-plus-year-old broadcast TV networks â ABC, CBS, and NBC â which a variety of studies confirm are less trusted than ever by the American people, especially conservatives.
Meanwhile, representatives of Fox News itself, now in its 24th year, are taking a well deserved victory lap for this achievement.  It comes in the midst of ongoing attacks from the channel’s direct competition (CNN and MSNBC); the entire MSM (including the New York Times in a page one story attacking FNC contributor John Solomon on Wednesday); left-wing advocacy groups like Media Matters for America; and a long line of Democrats, most of whom decline to appear on the channel.
Wednesday’s ratings were pretty much a blow-out with the exception of the so-called preferred demographic â viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, whom advertisers supposedly prefer.  Using that measure, ABC beat Fox News by 54,000 viewers: 496,000 to 442,000 for FNC.  There is no question, however, that Fox News was #1 by far in the number of total viewers all day, with an average of 2,885,000 viewers during the six hours of hearings.  The top six channels came in as follows according to Nielsen Media Research (accessible source: TVNewser article published Nov. 14 â free registration required)
Fox News 2,885,000 viewers
MSNBC 2,703,000
ABC 2,008,000
CBS 1,970,000
CNN 1,856,000
NBC 1,676,000
Significantly, the additional number of Americans who streamed the hearings on the internet is not readily available.  Unlike television ratings, which have been measured ever more closely since the dawn of commercial TV broadcasting in the late 1940s, there currently exists no absolutely reliable metric to measure or compare competing online live streams for an event like Wednesday’s hearings.
According to a news release emailed to journalists by Fox News Media Relations (some of the content of which is echoed in an article at Fox News dot com by Brian Flood), citing Early Nielsen Media Research: