CNN’s Anderson Cooper Has Highest Rated Show On Cable News Among Viewers 25-54

Cable news ratings, March 15, 2011:

•With his AC360 broadcasting from Japan, CNN’s Anderson Cooper snatched a title Tuesday night that usually belongs to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly: the highest rated show on cable news. Among viewers 25-54, the prime demographic for advertisers, Cooper had 917,000 viewers 25-54 at 10 p.m. and 975,000 at 11 p.m., easily outpacing O’Reilly, whose 8 p.m. hour attracted 787,000. At 11 p.m., when AC360 faces O’Reilly’s rebroadcast, the gap was wider, with O’Reilly attracting 626,000.

Among total viewers, O’Reilly stayed on top, with 3,506,000 viewers at 8 p.m., more than a million viewers ahead of Cooper’s 10 p.m. show, which had 1,916,000.

•Overall, Fox News won primetime, (narrowly beating CNN among viewers 25-54 and more widely beating CNN among total viewers) and MSNBC, widely criticized for its decision to stay with taped programming as the Japan story’s magnitude became known, was a distant third. MSNBC’s usually strong performers, Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow, both struggled, failing to reach the levels of CNN’s lowest rated shows.

Here’s the full scoreboard: