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Sunday’s Super Bowl preshow included about 15 minutes of live footage from the White House, where Fox News Channel‘s Bill O’Reilly conducted the traditional game-day sit-down with the commander in chief. The rest of interview, saved for Monday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, drove the FNC flagship to a 10-month high.
VIDEO: O’Reilly and President Spar Live on Benghazi, Health Care
President Obama’s interview with O’Reilly averaged 4.2 million viewers. That’s the highest viewership the show has seen since breaking-news coverage after the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013. The O’Reilly Factor also nabbed 626,000 viewers in the news demo of adults 25-54.
Perennially first place among all cable news broadcasts, O’Reilly easily beat his competition — and, in a rare victory for a cable news show, the program even topped some of the night’s broadcast fare, outperforming NBC’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit special by 1 million viewers.
The interview, part of an annual agreement between the White House and the Super Bowl broadcaster (FNC sister Fox this year), comes after a particularly strong week for FNC. Driven by a robust showing during the State of the Union address, FNC’s primetime lineup posted its best ratings since April 2013. It topped all of cable for the week, passing both USA and ESPN with an average 2.3 million viewers.
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