Fox News reaches 12.8 million viewers for GOP primary debate, despite Donald Trump's absence

abcnews.go.com:

Fox News reached an estimated 12.8 million viewers on two television channels and its streaming network for the first GOP presidential primary debate of the 2024 season, even though former President Donald Trump skipped it

NEW YORK — Even without lead contender Donald Trump, an estimated 12.8 million people watched the first Republican presidential primary debate on two Fox News television channels and its streaming service.

There seemed little evidence that Trump's attempt to counterprogram the debate, by appearing in an online interview with Tucker Carlson at about the same time on Wednesday, appreciably affected the number of people who were interested in checking out the eight alternatives.

The viewership was a little more than half the 24 million people who watched Trump appear in his first presidential debate in August 2015, the Nielsen company said. But it outpaced a January 2016 GOP candidates debate on Fox that Trump also skipped and was seen by 12.5 million people

Television is a vastly different world than it was eight years ago, with streaming more established and thousands of cable customers cutting the cord. The most-watched program seen live last week on either broadcast or cable TV was a “60 Minutes” rerun on CBS that reached 5.3 million viewers.

While ex-Fox host Carlson boasted Wednesday that his streamed interview would get a “far larger” audience than the televised debate — and Trump claiming that the interview exceeded the Super Bowl in audience — there's no reliable way of checking that.

X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, said late Thursday afternoon that the tweet of Carlson's interview show had 236.7 million views. But that's a count of how many times someone scrolled by