Perhaps aided by its live coverage of the manhunt in California, CNN had a good night Tuesday covering the State of the Union address as well.
Over all, in terms of total viewers, the ratings for the speech were down on most of the networks that carried it. CNN’s, however, were up sharply, gaining 36 percent over the audience that viewed the speech a year ago.
More significantly, CNN was the easy winner among the three cable news networks in reaching viewers in the category that generates the most ad sales for news programming: viewers between the ages of 25 and 54.
CNN was just slightly behind the usual ratings cable news leader, Fox News, in total viewers for the hour of the speech, with 3.635 million, up from 2.670 million in 2012. Fox News had 3.683 million, down 3 percent from 3.812 million; MSNBC averaged 3.034 million, up 8 percent from 2.815 million.
But in the 25-to-54 group, Fox News fell to third place with 957,000 viewers. CNN had big edge with 1.436 million in that category. MSNBC had 1.028 million.
CNN generally does especially well during breaking news stories, and the speech followed closely the coverage of the police shootout with the fugitive Christopher Dorner in the snowy forest near Big Bear Lake in California.
CNN actually continued its coverage of the Dorner situation on the HLN channel during the speech, and directed viewers there for continuing coverage.
The events in California were not covered live all evening by the broadcast networks, and all of them posted sharp declines in viewership from the State of the Union a year ago.
NBC edged CBS in terms of total viewers with 6.469 million (down 22 percent from last year), to 6.4 million for CBS (down 12 percent), and 5.494 million for ABC (down 17 percent.)
