President Obama's State of the Union Speech Watched By Nearly 38 Million

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Tune-in for President Obama’s State of the Union addresses continues to trend down. According to Nielsen, 37.7 million viewers watched Tuesday night’s speech on 14 networks.

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That was down more than 13 percent compared to last year’s speech, which averaged 42.7 million viewers across eleven networks. In fact, the high point for Obama came right after he was elected, when 52.3 million viewers on ten networks watched his February 2009 address to the joint session of Congress. His 2010 State of the Union speech pulled in 48 million viewers.

Fox News Channel topped the cable news competition for the speech on Tuesday night.

The network was watched by 3.8 million viewers with 1.1 million in news’ target demographic of 25-54-year-olds during the speech, which ran from 9:11 p.m. to 10:17 p.m.

MSNBC bested rival CNN among total viewers – 2.8 million to 2.6 million. That marks the first time MSNBC has surpassed CNN for a State of the Union speech. But CNN still topped MSNBC in the demo averaging 1.0 million viewers to MSNBC’s 818,000.

Among the broadcast networks, CBS pulled in the most viewers with 7.4 million followed by NBC (7.2 million), ABC (6.0 million) and Fox (5.3 million).