Another Election Upset: ABC's Coverage

Congress wasn't the only scene of a stunning upset on Election Night. While the Democrats were taking control of the House on Tuesday, ABC News was unseating perennial election coverage front-runner NBC News on broadcast television, and on cable in prime time, CNN pulled to within spitting distance of Fox News Channel and beat FNC among the 25-to-54 viewers advertisers hope to reach with news programming.

ABC News shrewdly started its "Vote 2006" coverage at 9:30 p.m. -- half an hour earlier than NBC and CBS -- to take advantage of the more than 23 million viewers delivered to Charlie Gibson's doorstep by "Dancing With the Stars."

(We'll pause here to give news junkies a little time to harrumph over that sentence.)

That was a tight race, too: Judges gave Mario Lopez an impressive 30 points for his tango, and 29 for his cha-cha-cha; they awarded Emmitt Smith 29 points for his waltz and 30 for his cha-cha-cha; and they handed Joey Lawrence 29 points for his quickstep, and his rumba brought in a score of 30.

Of the 23 million who sat glued to that performance show, about half hung on to watch the first half-hour of ABC's coverage of the political races. Overall, from 9:30 to 11 p.m., ABC News clocked an average of 9.67 million viewers.

And for 10 to 11 p.m., when the three broadcast news operations were going head-to-head, ABC News was still hanging on to 8.38 million viewers, thumping NBC News's 7 million and CBS News's 6.3 million.

Among those sought-after 25-to-54-year-olds, ABC had a slight edge over NBC and a slightly bigger margin over CBS.

The cable news election-night race was just as exciting. NBC cable cousin MSNBC suddenly sprang to life, averaging nearly 1 million viewers -- a 107 percent increase over its coverage of the 2002 midterms.

CNN logged just under 3 million viewers in prime time; Fox News Channel posted nearly 3.1 million viewers.

And, again in prime time, CNN had a slight edge over FNC among those 25-to-54-year-olds -- 1.33 million viewers to FNC's 1.25 million.

The story was much the same for the total day. From 6 a.m. to 3 a.m. FNC averaged 1.4 million and change to CNN's nearly 1.36 million and MSNBC's 805,000, with CNN slightly out front in the cherished demographic group.

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