22 Million See GOP’s 1st Night on 3 Networks
About 22 million people tuned in while all three major television networks were simultaneously covering the final 90 minutes of Monday’s opening night of the Republican National Convention, according to figures released Tuesday by the A.C. Nielsen Co.
The three-network figure topped the 20 million viewers who watched corresponding coverage on the first night of last month’s Democratic National Convention, according to an ABC spokesman.
Cable News Network reported that another 1,392,000 households opted for its coverage from 7-8:30 p.m. PDT. An additional 75,000 chose to view the proceedings on cable’s Comedy Central.
Figures were not available for three other services carrying the convention--C-SPAN, cable’s commercial-free public affairs network; the Public Broadcasting Service and Univision, a Spanish-language network.
CBS won the battle for viewers, drawing a 5.6 rating. With each rating point being equivalent to 921,000 households, that meant about 5.2 million households were tuned to CBS. ABC was second with a 5.3 rating and NBC was third with 5.2.
The 5.4 average for the three networks was 22.2% lower than the 6.6 for the first night of the 1988 Republican Convention.
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