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Nearly 19 million television viewers watched the first prime-time hearing of a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol – a quantifiable success for a Democrat-led team of lawmakers who hoped the investigation would shake their attention. the nation.
Rating figures released on Friday show the hearing was watched by about 18.8 million people on the six major US television and cable networks, which aired live on Thursday night. Preliminary data comes from Nielsen’s rating service and does not include the millions of others who have watched the hearing on streaming or social media applications, where many clips of testimony have gone viral.
The major television networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – have cleared their popular prime-time entertainment programs to broadcast the hearing without commercial breaks from 8pm to 10pm Eastern Time, as well as cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC.
ABC attracted the largest audience, nearly 4.9 million viewers, followed by MSNBC, NBC and CBS and CNN.
The only major cable news channel that did not cover the hearing was Fox News, whose conservative hosts apparently tried to counterprogram it, showing silent flashes of the audience in the hearing room as they and their guests ignored the committee’s efforts. (“The dumbest, the dullest, there’s absolutely nothing new, hours of democratic fundraising disguised as a January 6 hearing,” said Fox presenter Sean Hannity.)
Instead, Fox sent two of its news anchors to host a hearing on the much less-watched sister channel Fox Business Network, which attracted 223,000 viewers, as opposed to the 3 million who watched Fox News.
Viewers who attended the hearing saw unprecedented videos of the massacre during the day, interviews with witnesses conducted by the commission, and snippets of audio recordings worthy of news from key players.
Some moments of the hearing continued to generate headlines and catch the eye on Friday, such as the recorded testimony of Ivanka Trump, who told investigators she did not believe the election had been stolen.
The hearings – there will be a few more after Thursday’s debut, though not all will be in prime time – have been compared to previous congressional public sessions, such as the 1973 Senate Watergate committee hearings and the Army hearings. McCarthy since 1954
But since then, the media industry has changed dramatically. Fifty years ago, most Americans regularly watched one of the three major broadcast networks. Now a smaller number of viewers are divided between several TV channels, cable channels and countless digital platforms, many of which offer the public the opportunity to see the hearings in small clips.
Viewers switching between channels found a striking uniformity in the presentation of the hearing, with the networks mostly maintaining a non-flashing camera for the work of the committee, differing only in the selection of presenters and experts to analyze the hearing after 22:00.
Those in the TV business had particularly high expectations for Thursday’s show, given the behind-the-scenes role played by former ABC News president James Goldston, who helped improve the presentation of the TV audience committee.
“The tone was sober. The thematic order was tight and focused. The timeline video was difficult to watch, but not operational, I think, “said Andrew Hayward, former head of CBS News. “Overall, I felt that the production increased the weight of the moment without making it sensational.”
Industry observers have expressed some preliminary skepticism about viewership, given trends in recent decades. While about 71 percent of Americans told Gallup that they had watched some of the Watergate hearings live in 1973, the first televised hearing of the first impeachment trial against Donald Trump attracted only about 13 million viewers in 2019, although it aired in the less watched morning. The testimony of former Special Prosecutor Robert C. Mueller III in July 2019 also attracted nearly 13 million viewers, which was a shy of the 19.5 million television viewers who watched the testimony of former FBI Director James B. Comey in 2017.
While believing Thursday night’s hearing was for captivating television, industry analyst Brad Adgate cited both increased polarization and the proliferation of new video services to explain the decline in watergate-era ratings.
The commission’s second hearing is scheduled for Monday morning at 10 a.m., giving it a lower television profile. “It will be difficult to maintain the numbers in the future, but I expect a significant audience and a lot of noise on social media,” said Adgate.
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