Fox News Media captured the largest prime-time audience among cable news channels with its coverage of midterm election results on Tuesday, according to finalized Nielsen data reviewed by The Desk.
Between the hours of 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern Time, Fox News attracted 4.315 million viewers to its flagship cable news channel and another 346,000 viewers who watched a Fox News simulcast on Fox Business Network, bringing its total viewership to 4.661 million viewers, data from Nielsen revealed.
Fox’s standalone and total viewership put it in third place among all broadcast and cable networks on Tuesday, behind NBC News (6.7 million viewers) and ABC News (5.2 million) but ahead of CNN (4.1 million viewers), MS NOW (3.749 million viewers) and CBS News (2.8 million viewers).
Among media companies, Skydance had the strongest election night audience, with a combined 6.9 million viewers across CNN and CBS News. The two news organizations operate as separate outlets under a single owner; CNN is part of Skydance’s Warner Brod Discovery business while CBS News is part of Paramount.
MS NOW said its prime-time ratings on Tuesday delivered the strongest audience for election coverage in the network’s 30 year history. MS NOW operated as MSNBC until last year, ahead of its spin-out from Comcast’s NBC Universal into Versant. Preliminary ratings data released by Nielsen on Wednesday initially suggested MS NOW had higher overall viewership compared to CNN and Fox News, but finalized ratings data put the network in second place among cable networks.
Ratings data for Newsmax, NewsNation and other channels were not immediately available. In a press release on Thursday, a spokesperson for Nielsen said all measured broadcast and cable networks attracted a collective audience of 31.21 million viewers, delivering the highest audience for prime-time coverage of a midterm election since 2018 and the third-largest audience dating back to 2022.
On digital platforms, Fox News also led the pack, attracting 3.3 million social interactions across Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, according to data from Comscore Social and Emplifi. The network also recorded 15.4 million YouTube video views during Election Night, based on figures from Emplifi.
Fox News’ social media activity increased substantially the following day, when it generated 11.8 million interactions across the four major social platforms.
That figure placed Fox News first among a competitive group of 10 news organizations tracked by Emplifi and Comscore Social on November 4, ahead of NBC News and the New York Times.
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