48 million watch Obama’s State of Union

Posted Jan 29, 2010 by Walt Belcher

Updated Feb 2, 2010 at 03:04 PM

More than 48 million people watched President Obama’s first official State of the Union address on 11 networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, Telemundo, Univision, CNN, BET, CNBC, Fox News Channel and MSNBC), according to Nielsen.

That’s more than the 40.7 million that tuned in to Obama’s previous primetime speech—last December’s address about a troop increase in Afghanistan. But that speech was about one-third as long. The State of the Union speech on Wednesday night (Jan. 27) came in at over an hour.

Fox, which aired “American Idol” leading into the speech, led the broadcast networks from 9 to 10 p.m. with 9.7 million total viewers, followed by ABC (7.6 million), NBC (7.1 million) and CBS (6.1 million). Of course, the president could not hold on to much of his “Idol” lead-in, which pulled in 24.7 million viewers during the 8 p.m. hour.

Obama’s first State of the Union was also down 7 percent compared to President Bush’s first official address Jan. 29, 2002. That speech averaged 51.7 million viewers and came only a few months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But Obama managed a 5 percent increase over President Clinton’s first SOTU on Jan. 25, 1994, which averaged 45.8 million viewers.