Ratings: Fox News, ABC Lead State of the Union Coverage — 32.2 Million Tuned In, 74% of Viewers Were Age 55+
More than 32.2 million total people tuned in on Thursday night for President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address followed by the Republican response (provided by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt), according to updated tallies from Nielsen.
That marks an 18% gain over last year’s SOTU. Nielsen notes that 5% of viewers were aged 18-34,19% were 35-54, and 74% of viewers were aged 55 and older.
Fox News Channel once again led the TV pack with an average SOTU audience of 5.64 million viewers (from 9:15-10:45pm ET, up 20% from the cabler’s coverage of Biden’s 2023 address), followed by ABC (5 million, up 16% YOY), NBC (4.3 million), MSNBC (4.2 million), CBS (3.9 million), CNN (2.6 million, including CNN.com), Fox (1.7 million), Fox News Business (210K) and CNBC (112K).
Telemundo, Univision, PBS, NewsMax and NewsNation also contributed coverage.
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Thursday night’s regularly scheduled programming included fresh episodes of CBS’ Young Sheldon and Ghosts, Fox’s Next Level Chef and The CW’s Son of a Critch and Children Ruin Everything. TVLine will update this ratings report with those figures as they trickle in.
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The Live+Same Day numbers reported in TVLine’s daily-ish ratings column do NOT reflect a television program’s overall performance, given the increased use of delayed playback via DVR and streaming platforms, plus out-of-home viewing. These numbers (Nielsen fast nationals, unless specifically denoted in bold as finals) instead aim to simply illustrate trends or superlatives. Steve Harvey is not a judge or lawyer and merely offers an alternative forum of dispute resolution.
