This is posted by Rodney Ho on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog on Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Fox News and Atlanta-based CNN both pulled in record election night numbers Tuesday as Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to become president.
Fox News brought in the most viewers, averaging 12.2 million from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m., when the election was called. During prime-time (8 to 11 p.m.), CNN led in viewers with 13.26 million and with 25-54 year olds as well.
Not surprisingly, Fox News viewers stuck around for the final results at 2 a.m. far more than CNN viewers. By then, 9.8 million were still watching Fox. CNN's audience had fallen go 6.45 million.
During prime-time, another 41 million watched on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox (from 8-10), Univision and Telemundo. NBC had the largest audience among broadcast networks at 12 million.
MSNBC was far behind among the three cable news networks, averaging 5.2 million for the night, falling to 2.9 million by the 2 a.m. hour.
Counting the broadcast networks and other places that aired the program, at least 72 million watched election results on TV, breaking the 71.5 million who watched Barack Obama get elected in 2008. This doesn't count all the on-line viewing on Twitter, YouTube and elsewhere.
All the cable networks are bracing for a major drop off in viewership now that the election is over.
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