In his roller coaster ride of a bid for the White House, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump has broken yet another TV ratings record alongside Secretary Hillary Clinton.
The first Presidential debate was broadcast live on 12 networks with 81 million viewers tuning in for the first skirmish between the two candidates. Shockingly, the insanely high initial ratings numbers did not include online viewers, which will significantly make the ratings levels skyrocket as there were more than ever this year for this year’s debate.
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Among the individual networks, NBC currently led the pack with 16.9 million viewers, followed by ABC (12.6 million), CBS (11.3 million), and Fox (5.1 million), according to News Day.
On cable, Fox News racked up 11.4 million total viewers, followed by CNN with 9.8 million, MSNBC with 4.9 million, Fox Business with 673,000, and CNBC with 520,000, according to Variety.
The massive number of viewers didn’t include those who watched outside their homes, such as in a bar. However, in TV’s 60-year history of televised presidential debates, Nielsen has never included such statistics in their computations. Also, channels such as PBS or C-Span are not included in the tallies.
For comparison’s sake, President Obama’s first debate against 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney averaged around 67 million viewers. It was the most watched debate of the three in 2012, but didn’t come close to the record breaking mark. The previous record holding television event was Ronald Reagan’s debate against Jimmy Carter in 1980, which logged 81 million viewers.
The official Nielsen tally for the total number of viewers will be issued later on Tuesday.
Are you surprised that the first Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was the most watched debate in TV history?
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