President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address on ending his re-election campaign Wednesday drew a large TV audience.
About 26 million people watched the 15-minute speech at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT across eight broadcast and cable networks, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings. That figure will grow some with the inclusion of other outlets in the final numbers.
ABC had the largest single-network audience for Biden’s address with 6.35 million viewers. Fox News drew 5.12 million viewers, followed by CBS (4.05 million), MSNBC (3.31 million), CNN (2.34 million), the Fox broadcast network (1.48 million) and Fox Business (143,000). Precise figures for NBC weren’t immediately available, but the network averaged 3 million viewers from 8-8:30 p.m. ET, according to early Nielsen figures.
ABC also led among the key news demographic of adults 25-54, drawing 1.31 million viewers in that age group. Fox News had 862,000 viewers in the key demo, beating out the 837,000 for CBS. CNN averaged 568,000 adults 25-54, followed by Fox broadcast (444,000), MSNBC (416,000) and Fox Business (32,000). Demo numbers for NBC weren’t available.
Biden’s Oval Office address was the latest of several big TV news events related to the 2024 presidential campaign in the past couple of weeks. An attempted assassination of Republican nominee Donald Trump, the Republican convention and Biden’s withdrawal from the campaign have all drawn sizable audiences.
