Bernie Sanders A Hit On Fox News Channel, Clocks Biggest Town-Hall Crowd This Election Season
Bernie Sanders’ foray to Fox News Channel for a town hall with Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum was the most watched town hall of this election season to date.
Sanders clocked nearly 2.6 million viewers from 6:30-7:30 PM Monday; that includes 489,000 in the 25-54 news demographic. Sanders logged the highest rated weekday delivery of the year in the news demo, and the second highest weekday delivery in total viewers among cable news networks.
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The event that so irked President Donald Trump and FNC primetime star Sean Hannity thumped its cable news competition combined in both metrics. In the same block of time, CNN logged 913K viewers with The Situation Room and Erin Burnett’s program, including 281K in the news demo. MSNBC, meanwhile, logged 1.44M viewers, including 208K in the news demo, with Ari Melber and Chris Matthews.
Sanders’ town hall also outstripped FNC’s average in that hour by 24% in total viewers and 40% in the news demo.
We may never know how many Fox News Channel viewers were hate-watching the current lead Dem among those bidding to unseat Trump in 2020. At least two viewers fell into that category: Trump and Hannity.
Trump tweeted Tuesday morning it was “weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews,” signaling the “audience” may have been staged by putting the words in quotes in his morning tweet.
Chimed in Trump’s disciple Hannity, “Phew! That was hard to watch! Bernie Sanders for two hours – Wow!” Hannity snarked, of his Fox News bosses, “Gee, let’s hear every communist idea we possibly can!”
Here’s more of Sanders’ town hall:
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