Hillary Clinton Delivers Most-Watched "Meet the Press" in Years

You can't say Hillary Clinton isn't good for TV ratings. Check out the below Huffington Post article about Hillary's interview this week on "Meet the Press."

-CHRIS MCLEOD-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/17/hillary-clinton-delivers-_n_82048.html

Hillary Clinton Delivers Most-Watched "Meet The Press" In Almost Three Years

Huffington Post | Rachel Sklar | January 17, 2008 03:34 PM

Hillary Clinton brought a ratings bonanza this "Meet the Press" this week, delivering an audience of 4.71 million viewers to the network — it's largest audience for a regularly-scheduled prgram since January 30, 2005 (excluding the MTP in February, 2006 during the Torino Olympics). The guest on Jan. 30/05, incidentally? Senator John Kerry, in his first TV interview after losing the 2004 election. (The other guest was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who had just taken over the anchor chair from Tom Brokaw the month before.)

According to Nielson (and via NBC press release), Clinton helped host Tim Russert positively trounce his Sunday-morning rivals, showing a whopping 69% more than second-place "Face The Nation" on CBS (2.8 million) and 70% more than the third-place "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on ABC (2.77 million). According to NBC, these were the biggest margins clocked in ages, since September 2004 for CBS and November 2005 for ABC.

Perspective: That means that "Meet The Press" outdrew "Good Morning America" last week, which averaged 4.58 million viewers. That's a pretty good day for MTP. And for MSNBC, which pulled 631,000 viewers for its MTP replay later that day, and online with over 116,000 streams and 142,000 downloads.

MTP also beat Chris Wallace's "Fox News Sunday," which drew a 1.325 million-viewer audience — a factor of 256%.

Watch the netcast here, read the transcript here, and more about the Sunday talk shows on HuffPo's "TV Soundoff," which runs down the Sunday shows each week.