Friday Ratings: Bret Baier Laps Field In Demo; HLN Likely Misses Casey Anthony Coverage

There was a lot of news to digest last week, and it appears that the ratings winner based on Friday’s ratings was Fox News Bret Baier, who enjoyed more viewers in demo than all of his cable news competitors combined. This high number helped his Fox News cohorts, as even O’Reilly enjoyed good numbers despite a substitute host in Laura Ingraham Monica Crowley.

On the other end of the spectrum is HLN, who likely miss the resolution of the Casey Anthony trial. The national obsession with that particular story was ratings gold for HLN, but their August ratings have dropped to much lower, though not unreasonable ratings. A honeymooning Joy Behar certainly did not help their ratings.

Anderson Cooper‘s transition to the 8pm time has still not yet turned to a ratings boon for CNN, though the rerun at 10pm is getting a decent number, which likely makes the programmers at CNN reasonably happy. Still too early to call the move of AC360 to 8pm a hit yet.

Here are the complete cable news ratings for Friday night: