Fox News’s airing of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, attracted a record-setting audience.
Approximately 7.7 million people tuned into Fox News to watch Trump’s first campaign rally in months amid the coronavirus, making it the most-watched Saturday in the network’s history during the 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot, the network reported Monday citing early Nielsen data.
The audience eclipsed 8 million viewers during its peak. Additionally, more than 1.5 million people aged 25-54, a key target demographic for advertisers, watched the president’s event. The network also saw a record-setting number of viewers for the hour following the rally’s conclusion.
The only Fox News broadcast to outpace the president’s rally in viewers this year was Trump’s State of the Union address. The speech was made in February in front of both legislatures.
Slightly more than 4 million people tuned in to watch the president’s rally on CNN and MSNBC as well.
The Trump campaign also noted that there were other ways for people to watch the event, aside from tuning into cable news.
“President Trump’s rally in Tulsa attracted over 4 million unique viewers across all of the campaign’s digital media channels. The live-streamed pre-rally shows drew an audience of more than 2.5 million unique viewers by themselves,” Trump 2020 communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement.
The viewership online is starkly different than the number of people who attended the rally in-person, which garnered significant media attention given the president and his campaign’s commentary leading up to the event.
Approximately 6,200 people attended the rally, which was held at an arena that has a capacity of more than 19,000.
TikTok users and fans of K-pop music groups claimed they pulled a prank on the president’s team by making hundreds of thousands of fake requests after his reelection campaign touted that more than a million people had filled out interest forms. However, the Trump campaign blamed the coronavirus, the media, and protesters as the main factors behind the lower-than-expected attendance.
