ABC’s David Muir Sees Ratings Surge On Monday Despite Pro-Trump Outlets Claiming Audience Fled Post-Debate
Following last Tuesday’s presidential debate moderated by ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis, several conservative news outlets published articles claiming that viewers were fleeing World News Tonight, Muir’s top-rated nightly news broadcast. Those reports came as former President Donald Trump and his supporters criticized Muir and Davis for their moderation of the debate.
The New York Post went so far as to publish an editorial on the supposed ratings drop and declared, “The verdict is in: ABC’s utterly biased ‘moderation’ effort at the Trump-Harris debate is killing ratings.”
“David Muir, of ‘World News Tonight,’ saw his program lose almost a million viewers per night after his in-kind campaign contribution to VP Kamala Harris — a 12% drop,” claimed the Post’s editorial board.
The editorial, published 8 days after the debate, only cites the one statistic to claim Muir’s ratings are down, before repeating many of the lines of attack used by Trump in recent days to defend his performance by accusing the moderators of bias.
The piece cites a report on FoxNews.com that touted the 12% number and tied it to criticism from Trump supporters about the moderation efforts of Muir. The Fox News piece, however, adds crucial context explaining why the ratings had dropped — something the Post omitted.
“ABC News defenders have pointed to a two-week blackout of Disney-owned stations on DirectTV because of a carriage disagreement from Sept 1-14. However, the weekday episodes of “World News Tonight” that aired prior to the debate were down only 8% from the program’s year-to-date totals compared to a 12% drop for the episodes that aired after the debate,” wrote Fox’s Brian Flood.
In other words: the 12% drop in ratings accounted for the days immediately following the debate as stacked up against the program’s average for the year. Yet its ratings were down because of a blackout on ABC by DirectTV. If you focus on the three days before the debate vs. the three days after (a comparison that takes into account the blackout), World News Tonight’s ratings were down just 4%: 6.68 million viewers watched the program the three days after the debate and 6.74 million watched it the three days prior to the debate.
Hardly the ratings disaster described by the Post.
This week, Muir gained back those viewers. A whopping 7.6 million viewers tuned in to World News Tonight on Monday, which is a 9 percent year-over-year gain for the show. In the key 18-49 age demographic the show was also up some 2 percent, marking the program’s best Monday in 5 weeks, according to Nielsen data. While Mondays are always highly rated nights for evening broadcasts and viewers no doubt tuned in for additional information about the second Trump assassination attempt, the ratings surge strongly counters the narrative that Muir has lost credibility among the public.
Other right-leaning outlets like Outkick, The New York Sun, and MegynKelly.com all ran headlines claiming that Muir’s audience was running away after the debate – all citing the 12 percent figure.
Notably, Muir’s World News Tonight remained the number one news broadcast in the ratings, beating second-place NBC News and third-place CBS News, despite the DirectTV dispute.
