An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen.
Though the Thursday night figure pales next to presidential debates or this year’s State of the Union address, it’s still much larger than the audience that would normally watch a daytime congressional hearing.
While the broadcast networks gave up their prime-time entertainment offerings and CNN and MSNBC gave the hearing wall-to-wall coverage, there was a conspicuous outlier among the cable news networks.
Fox News, the most-watched network in cable, did not carry the hearings live, instead sticking with its usual prime-time lineup.
The Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity dedicated their shows to Jan. 6, and both had the hearing playing live in a split screen – but the feed from Congress was muted while the hosts spent two hours belittling the committee’s efforts.
Fox’s counterprogramming efforts drew an average audience of three million, which is just about normal.
The Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum did cover the hearings live but did so on Fox Business, which attracts far fewer viewers.
Roughly 223,000 people watched the hearings on Fox Business.
When Mr. Baier and Ms. MacCallum switched over to Fox News for a two-hour special at 11 p.m., an average of 1.3 million watched.
Local affiliates of the Fox broadcast network had the option of picking up the Fox Business feed but were not required to do so.
Some major local Fox stations, like Los Angeles and Chicago, took the feed while others aired regularly scheduled entertainment programming.
The Fox station in the New York market elected to run episodes of “MasterChef Junior” and “Don’t Forget the Lyrics.
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