The Monday cable news ratings are in and as expected, the events in Boston made viewership surge as Americans were hungry for the latest information on the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. However, as the Hollywood Reporter notes, the numbers mostly surged for CNN and Fox News while MSNBC was left in the dust:
Viewership peaked during primetime, with Fox News Channel (3.9 million), CNN (2.75 million) and MSNBC (1.25 million) pulling in a cumulative average of 7.9 million viewers between 8 and 11 p.m.
Conventional wisdom has always held that CNN’s numbers tend to swell in moments of national crisis and momentous news events. With the struggles CNN has been having, many in media circles assumed that MSNBC would benefit from viewers who are no longer regularly tuning to CNN. These latest numbers appear to show that the fact that MSNBC injects more opinion into their broadcasts compared to their three rivals, and certainly continued their trend toward biased coverage during their Monday programming, viewers are trending more toward Fox News for news and information on days where breaking events draw even more viewers than normal days.