Trump rally flop in Tulsa, but a hit on television

NEW YORK (AP) — Now it's apparent where many of President Donald Trump's supporters who stayed away from Saturday's campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were instead: they were home watching it on television.

Fox News Channel, which aired Trump's speech live, had the biggest Saturday night audience in the network's 24-year history, the Nielsen company said. During Trump's address at 9 p.m. on Saturday, Fox had 8.2 million people watching.

CNN and MSNBC aired only clips of Trump talking, yet each news network had about twice as many viewers as they normally get on Saturday nights. Collectively, the three networks had nearly 12 million viewers for its Trump coverage, Nielsen said.

For those in Oklahoma, the night's biggest story was the arena's empty seats.

In the absence of sports or first-run scripted series, news continues to be the dominant force in television viewing. Fox News Channel's prime-time average of 3.68 million viewers for the week topped all broadcast and cable networks.

ABC's prime-time interview of John Bolton by Martha Raddatz was seen by 6.2 million people on Sunday, third only to “America's Got Talent” and “60 Minutes” on broadcast networks last week.

CBS, with an average of 3.4 million viewers, was the most-watched broadcast network last week. NBC had 3.1 million, ABC had 2.7 million, Univision had 1.38 million, Fox had 1.35 million, ION Television had 1.2 million and Telemundo had 760,000.

After Fox News, MSNBC had 1.98 million for second among the cable networks in prime time, CNN had 1.64 million, HGTV had 1.26 million and TLC had 1.19 million.

ABC's “World News Tonight” led the evening newscasts with an average of 8.7 million viewers. The “NBC Nightly News” had 7.4 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 5.2 million.

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