ABC, Fox News Maintain Leads in Second Quarter TV News Ratings

Fox News and ABC News continued to hold sizable leads in TV news ratings for the second quarter.

On the broadcast networks, ABC’s World News Tonight led the April-to-June period with an average of 7.37 million viewers each weeknight. The David Muir-anchored evening newscast led the NBC Nightly News (5.79 million) and CBS Evening News (3.85 million) by sizable margins. In fact, World News Tonight’s 1.58 million-viewer lead over NBC is its largest margin of victory in a second quarter in 30 years.

World News Tonight also led the key demographics of adults 25-54 (1.01 million viewers) and adults 18-49 (700,000) for the quarter. It has led network evening newscasts in the 25-54 demo for every quarter since January to March of 2020 and topped the quarterly total-viewer ranks since the second quarter of 2017.

All three network newscasts lost viewers compared to the first three months of the year, when ABC averaged 8.13 million viewers, NBC 6.6 million and CBS 4.59 million.

On cable, Fox News maintained its big lead over CNN and MSNBC in both the full-day and primetime Nielsen numbers, though the margin shrunk a bit: Fox came down some from a record-setting first quarter, fueled by the early days of the second Trump administration, and the other two were fairly steady.

Fox News averaged 1.63 million viewers for the full broadcast day and 2.63 million in primetime for the quarter, vs. 1.92 million and 3.01 million in the (again, record-setting) first quarter. MSNBC’s 596,000 average for the full day inched up from 593,000 in Q1, but its primetime audience of 1.01 million viewers was off a tick from 1.02 million. CNN drew 406,000 total-day viewers and 538,000 in primetime, down a little from 428,000 and 558,000 in the first quarter.

Among adults 25-54, Fox News averaged 202,000 viewers over the full day and 304,000 in prime for the quarter, vs. 247,000 and 380,000 in the first quarter. MSNBC’s 57,000-viewer average for the full day was even with Q1, while primetime slipped slightly to 91,000 from 96,000. CNN (71,000 full day/105,000 primetime) dipped from averages of 79,000 and 121,000 in the first quarter.