Despite breaking late on a weekend evening, the verdict in the murder trial of George Zimmerman attracted an audience of more than 10 million viewers to cable news networks, a huge total for a Saturday night.
Preliminary ratings showed that for the hour from 10 to 11 p.m. when the verdict came in, Fox News and CNN both attracted well over 3 million viewers, while MSNBC trailed badly with only about 1.3 million.
Fox had the highest number, 3.68 million viewers, just ahead of CNN with 3.4 million. But CNN outpaced Fox News among the viewers that television advertisers pay most to reach, those between the ages of 25 and 54. In that category, CNN had 1.72 million viewers to 1.11 million for Fox News. MSNBC had only 510,000.
MSNBC actually finished in fourth place over all, also coming in behind CNN’s sister network HLN, which is known for covering criminal trials. HLN had 2.2 million total viewers for third in that category and 980,000 in the 25-54 group, which also placed it third.