Laura Ingraham, Rachel Maddow Score Big Tuesday Ratings with President Trump, Melania Trump Tell-All Author Interviews

Two news-making interviews on Fox News and MSNBC scored big ratings on Tuesday night for their respective programs, as The Ingraham Angle and The Rachel Maddow Show, respectively, waged a pitched battle for third place in the nightly cable news ratings.

Fox’s Ingraham once again enjoyed near-record show ratings for the second night in a row as it broadcast the latter half of host Laura Ingraham’s extended interview with President Donald Trump, who made several, highly controversial remarks during the Q & A. The show actually bested its Monday night numbers in the highly coveted 25 – 54 age demographic, pulling in 754,000 viewers versus the first night’s 746,000. That strong performance was only bested on Tuesday night by Fox News’ primetime companions, Tucker Carlson Tonight, which posted a monster 934,000 viewers in the demo, and Hannity, which came in second in cable news with 892,000 A25 – 54 viewers.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, however, punched her way to third place in overall viewers on Tuesday with her long interview with Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the author of a new tell-all book about Melania Trump. Maddow’s early peek at the insider account of the First Lady’s time in the White House also offered eye-opening revelations, and garnered 3.86 million total viewers (625,000 in the demo). That number edged out Fox’s Ingraham for third place by just 40,ooo viewers. Once again, Fox’s Tucker and Hannity reigned with 4.91 million and 4.84 million total viewers, respectively.

Across all of primetime, Fox New far outpaced its competition in the demo, with its 860,000 viewers totaling more than its CNN (325,000) and MSNBC (456,000) rivals combined. The same phenomenon occurred in total viewers, with Fox’s audience of 4.52 million beating the combined total of CNN (1.40 million) and MSNBC (2.90 million).

In the 6:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. daypart, the ratings battle was slightly closer, but Fox still dominated, winning with 432,000 viewers in the demo. MSBNC eked out a second place finish over CNN, with 255,000 to 247,000 A25 – 54 viewers, respectively. MSNBC’s had a stronger runner-up finish in overall total day viewers, coming in with 1.66 million viewers, in between Fox’s leading 2.43 million audience and CNN’s third-place 1.08 million viewers.