According to Steve Krakauer he is.
Although Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity typically have higher ratings than their Fox News colleague, Beck often garners a higher percentage of the people watching television during their respective time slots.
Krakauer explained the math Friday:
One of the ratings categories for broadcast TV is the share data, which is defined by Nielsen as: “The percent of households (or persons) using television who are tuned to a specific program, station or network in a specific area at a specific time.” (Put another way – it’s the percentage of people watching that particular channel at that particular hour, based on the total number of people watching TV at the time.) It’s used by broadcast TV, but never for cable TV – the reason being the ratings are usually so small compared to all of television the share average would be negligible.
Well not so for Fox News. We took a look at the cable ratings from 5-11pmET using the Persons Using Television (PUT) average to determine the share ratings for last week’s cable programs. And when weighted based on this average, Glenn Beck’s 5pmET show comes out on top by a significant margin.
Beck has a 5.5% share in total viewers, compared to O’Reilly at 8pmET with 4.6%, Hannity at 9pmET with 3.9% and Greta Van Susteren at 10pmET with 3.4%. In the A25-54 demographic, the breakdown was similar: Beck – 4.1%, O’Reilly – 3.1%, Hannity – 2.5%, Greta – 2.1%. (By comparison, no other cable news network reached higher than 1% share at any of those hours.)
These percentages are pretty remarkable for all of the big FNC anchors, but specifically for Beck. 5.5% of all people watching TV (broadcast and cable) were tuned to his 5pm show last week. A cable news show. Now last week happened to be an especially good week for Beck, anchored by his Communism special on Friday. Friday was his best ratings ever in both categories, and he had the top cable show in the 5pm hour in both categories as well.
Yes, that is remarkable when you consider the number of homes that don't have access to cable networks.
Maybe Krakauer should next do calculations for the MSNBC hosts so that we could really rub in their noses just how poorly they do compared to Fox.
On the other hand, these numbers exemplify how wrong the White House is about FNC. Just another in a growing list of examples as to how out of touch this administration is with average Americans, and how many people are likely offended when government officials claim Fox isn't a news organization.
Good work, Steve. Nice report.
