Paris attacks drive viewers to news as Ten’s Princess Mary telemovie pulls 929,000
In the wake of the tragedy in Paris, the sails of the Opera House were lit blue, white and red, in solidarity with the people of France.
The tragic events in Paris which unfolded on Saturday morning in Australia drove huge audiences to news bulletins across the weekend as people sought more information.
Sky News, which carried the UK Sky News’ coverage of events as they unfolded, saw a huge surge in its audience on Saturday with the third and fourth most-watched shows of the day on pay-TV with 80,000 viewers nationally, while Nine News’ evening bulletin was the most-watched thing on TV on the day grabbing 1.164m metro viewers while 965,000 watched Seven’s equivalent.
The attacks, which started just after 7am AEDST also drew people to the breakfast shows on TV with 310,000 watching Seven’s Weekend Sunrise and 337,000 tuned in to Nine’s Weekend Today. As the morning progressed the an extended Sunrise into rolling news, on Seven, grabbed 327,000 viewers and Nine’s Mornings pulled in 354,000.
You need to be careful in ascribing ratings to programs on days when so much programming has been pre-empted.
For example ABC World News and CBS News did not air on Sky locally on Saturday.
And Beach Cops did not air at 8pm Sunday on Seven. It was an hour long Paris news special.
But the graphs look pretty.
ABC News24 did a very good job at covering the event. Their anchors were (unusually) switched on and did an excellent job. A rating of 1.5 seems to reflect oversight by viewers.
Myriad, it’s a shame that the same can’t be said about the CNN reporter who interviewed Bataclan survivors John Leader and his 12 yo son, Oscar.
Young Oscar was asked by the reporter had he ever seen a dead body before, and then asked him to describe the carnage around him. Clearly, Oscar was traumatised by his experience.
Hang your head in shame, CNN.
Amazing that the Princess Mary telemovie can win it’s slot with less than a million viewers.
Who remembers when shows like this used top get 2 million viewers when our population was much smaller?
Just shows with fragmentation, that success can now be attributed to a show that almost 22 million did NOT watch.