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TV Ratings: State of the Union Audience Drops
TV Ratings: State of the Union Audience Drops,TV ratings for the 2023 State of the Union dropped considerably from the previous year.

TV Ratings: State of the Union Audience Drops

President Joe BidenJacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images

Logo textThe on-air audience for the State of the Union address fell considerably from a year ago.

President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union averaged 24.17 million viewers across the four main broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and three largest cable news channels (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC). That’s down by about 29 percent from 33.83 million who watched the State of the Union on those seven outlets in 2022.

The 2022 State of the Union, the first official one of Biden’s term, brought in 38.2 million viewers across 16 outlets. Final figures from every Nielsen-rated channel that carried Tuesday’s address will be available later in the day, but the total is likely to be under 30 million on-air viewers, which would make it among the least watched State of the Union addresses (or presidential addresses to Congress for incoming executives) of the past 30 years.

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Fox News had the largest for the speech with just under 4.7 million viewers, beating out ABC’s 4.41 million for the top spot. NBC finished third with 3.78 million viewers, followed by CBS (3.64 million), MSNBC (3.57 million), CNN (2.41 million) and the Fox broadcast network (1.66 million). Spanish language broadcasters Univision (1.08 million) and Telemundo (836,000) added about 1.9 million viewers to the total.

ABC led the prime news demographic of adults 25-54, drawing about 1.07 million viewers in that age range. NBC and Fox News each had about 852,000, followed by CBS (706,000), CNN (657,000), Fox broadcast (511,000) and MSNBC (499,000).

Elsewhere Tuesday, LeBron James breaking the NBA scoring record delivered strong ratings for TNT. Its telecast of the Los Angeles Lakers-Oklahoma City Thunder game where James surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s long-standing record of 38,387 career points brought in 2.98 million viewers — the biggest NBA audience for TNT since the opening night of the season — and was easily the night’s highest-rated program among adults 18-49 with a 1.29 rating (equal to about 1.68 million people).