Fox News Tuesday Coronavirus Special With Trump the Highest Rated Town Hall in Cable News History

Fox News posted a massive audience Tuesday with its midday virtual town hall featuring President Donald Trump and members of the coronavirus task force.

According to data from Nielsen, the network pulled in 4,409,000 overall viewers between 12:00 and 2:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday during the forum, along with 1,008,000 in the advertiser-coveted adults 25-54 demographic. Though obviously not a traditional town hall with a live audience due to the virus outbreak, Tuesday’s virtual forum hosted by Bill Hemmer and Harris Faulkner — which took place at the White House and included questions from viewers writing in — set the record for most-watched town hall of all time. Incidentally, the previous record stood for less than three weeks. The March 5 Fox News town hall in Pennsylvania featuring Trump drew a total audience of 4,180,000.

Fox News actually improved on those strong numbers during prime time. Sean Hannity was tops in the overall category with 4,942,000. While Tucker Carlson ruled in the key demo — scoring 1,031,000 in that subset. But ratings on all three of the major cable news networks were extremely high on Tuesday night — as they have been for much of the crisis. In particular, CNN shows were strong in the key demo — with Anderson Cooper drawing 843,000, and Chris Cuomo 808,000. Cuomo outpaced 9 p.m. rival Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, who drew 732,000.

MSNBC turned the tables on CNN in the overall category for prime time overall, though, with 3,016,000 viewers to CNN’s 2,322,000. Fox News was no. 1 in primetime, with 4,643,000 total viewers.