Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on Face the Nation, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and Meet the Press on Sunday morning. The CBS News program took the top spot in the Nielsen ratings.
The January 4th edition of the program saw 3.3 million viewers for the half-hour version of its broadcast. That marks the 15th consecutive week that Face the Nation earned the top spot in the Sunday public affairs ratings.
Additionally, the CBS News show saw 442,000 viewers from the coveted Persons 25-54 demographic during the Sunday program, which also included interviews with Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Chris Van Hollen (D-KS).
However, Face the Nation finished behind Meet the Press in that key demo, as the Kristen Welker-led program earned 478,000 viewers from that sector.
The NBC News program saw an average audience of 3.020 million viewers during the hour. That rested just slightly behind This Week with George Stephanopoulos, with the ABC News show earning 3.049 million viewers during the week.
In the full-hour ratings for Face the Nation, the CBS News show averaged 2.9 million viewers.
Fox News Sunday — helmed by Gillian Turner in the stead of Shannon Bream — saw just over 1 million viewers, with 203,000 coming from the key demographic.
The news of Face the Nation earning the most overall viewers in the linear television metrics comes on the heels of the data showing that NBC News’ Meet the Press earned the most viewers on both YouTube and TikTok compared to the rival shows from CBS News and ABC News.
On YouTube, Meet the Press topped one million views for the Rubio segment alone in the first 24 hours after publishing. That figure topped ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopoulos, which drew about 340,000 views. CBS News’ Face the Nation trailed further, finishing with roughly 184,000 YouTube views, as of this publication.
Short-form video told a similar story. Meet the Press amassed nearly 6 million TikTok views tied to the Rubio interview. CBS News posted 946,600 TikTok views, according to publicly available figures. ABC News utilized a slightly different strategy on the platform, distributing three clips that collectively generated just over 5 million views from those videos.
Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. To stay updated, sign up for our newsletters and get the latest information delivered straight to your inbox.
