Fox News was far and away the most-watched TV network during President Trump’s inauguration on Monday, a sign of both the channel’s dominance in cable news and the overall drop in Americans who rely on television to keep up on current events.
A peak of 34.4 million people tuned in live to watch Mr. Trump’s lunchtime swearing-in on the major TV networks, according to statistics from Nielsen.
The peak TV audience was down from the nearly 40 million viewers who watched former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s speech in 2021, and the 38.3 million who watched Mr. Trump’s first inaugural speech in 2017.
The downward trend is in keeping with the country’s media consumption habits writ large, as more Americans turn away from traditional television and follow major events on websites, social media, and other digital platforms.
Fox News’s audience, however, was roughly in line with its 2017 viewership. About 10.3 million people watched the network between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Eastern on Monday, more than twice the number that tuned in to any other channel, according to preliminary data from Nielsen. The Fox News viewership in that time slot outstripped the 9.3 million who watched CBS’s telecast of this month’s Golden Globe Awards.
Viewership for CNN and MSNBC between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Eastern on Monday fell significantly from four years ago. CNN recorded about 1.7 million viewers, down from about 10 million for Mr. Biden’s inaugural speech; MSNBC, whose anchors lamented Mr. Trump’s return to office, was seen by 848,000 people on Monday, according to the early Nielsen data. It had about 6.5 million viewers for Mr. Biden’s speech in 2021.
Nielsen said that the average viewership across 15 major networks on Monday, between 10:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. Eastern, was 24.6 million people.