Fox News anchor Bret Baier has seen his 6 p.m. show — Special Report — named the top rated show in cable news on a near daily basis this week. It’s a rare occurrence for a show outside prime time, and Baier can thank President Donald Trump’s daily briefings with the coronavirus task force for the audience surge.
On Thursday, Trump’s briefing aired in the 6 p.m. hour. Special Report, as a result, earned a whopping 5.44 million total viewers and 1.14 million in the advertiser coveted 25-54 demo, beating out the competition on MSNBC and CNN.
Fox News cut away from Trump’s briefing at 7 p.m. to air its coronavirus town hall — hosted by anchor Martha MacCallum and held in partnership with Facebook — which drew an impressive 3.81 million viewers and 606,000 in the demo. According to Fox News, the Facebook stream of the town hall drew 22.5 million views.
CNN, meanwhile, continued its impressive feat of winning the daytime demo ratings. The network drew 581,000 viewers in the demo between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., while Fox News drew 575,000 and MSNBC lagged far behind with 251,000. In total viewers, Fox came first with 2.6 million, CNN came second with 1.94 million and MSNBC placed third with 1.57 million.
Another promising trend for CNN came with the network’s prime time ratings. CNN thankfully gave Chris Cuomo, who is battling coronavirus, something of a night off, replacing his hourlong show with a coronavirus town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Cuomo did beam in to give CNN’s audience a informative first person account of how he’s fighting against the sickness.
CNN’s town hall averaged 3 million total viewers and 926,000 in the demo.
Over on MSNBC, which has been lagging behind Fox News and CNN in many an hour during the coronavirus pandemic, Rachel Maddow was the top rated show. She improved on her numbers from Wednesday night, drawing 624,000 viewers in the demo and 3.41 million overall.