While many outlets in the ”mainstream media” slammed the Donald Trump rally held Saturday evening in Tulsa, Okla., as attracting fewer people than usual for President Trump’s events, the Fox News Channel set a record of 7.7 million viewers that night.
Between the hours of 8 p.m. and 10 o’clock, Trump’s remarks set a record ratings total, and when the 11 p.m. hour was counted in, the three hours drew the channel’s largest Saturday night prime-time numbers ever.
According to an article posted on Monday by FNC’s Brian Flood, the media reporter noted that the numbers set a record despite the smaller-than-expected crowd in attendance at the event. Flood also noted that Trump’s State of the Union address was the only telecast on Fox News in 2020 to outdraw the 9 p.m. hour of Trump’s speech on Saturday, which averaged 8.2 million total viewers.
Looking at a Media Research Center study, it’s not surprising to see why Americans, conservative, independent and other, chose Fox. If you wanted to watch Trump’s speech, Fox was the only cable network that showed the President’s words. CNN and MSNBC only played about three percent of it. The rest was just reporters and analysts bashing the rally.
Flood continued:
By comparison, ESPN’s coverage of the NFL Draft’s opening night averaged 8 million, MSNBC’s most-watched Democratic primary debate averaged 7.7 million, and CNN’s most-watched Democratic primary debate averaged 7.4 million.
The Trump campaign has stated that even more viewers tuned in when including the significant audience that watched via streaming platforms.
In addition, Trump 2020 Communications Director Tim Murtaugh said, the Tulsa rally “attracted more than 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.”
As if those numbers weren’t high enough, the Fox News Channel’s YouTube stream also picked up “more than 2.1 million views, while the Fox Business Network’s live stream drew over 580,000 [viewers]. The rally was streamed on a variety of other platforms as well.”
“The President and his campaign had touted a million ticket requests; and the arena's capacity is [only] 19,000,” Murtaugh noted.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media “focused on the crowd size, with some top Democrats gloating that teenage activists sabotaged the turnout through the TikTok and K-Pop [Korean pop music] Chinese video-sharing platform.”
