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Coverage of the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, drew an average of 30.6 million total viewers across 12 networks from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, according to Nielsen Media Research and media outlets.
That’s down 18 percent in viewers from Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, when 37.8 million viewers tuned in. Fox News led all coverage with 8.8 million viewers, with NBC coming in second. Beyond the two leaders, networks that Nielsen measured included ABC, CBS, Telemundo, Univision, CNBC, CNN, Fox Business Network, Galavision, HLN and MSNBC.
However, viewership was up 50 percent compared to Obama’s second swearing-in in 2013. Second-term inaugurations tend to be less watched since they are essentially putting a legal stamp on an existing administration.
The most-viewed inauguration remains that of Ronald Reagan in 1981, which averaged 41.8 million people. Obama’s 2009 inauguration ranked second overall. Trump comes in fifth behind Jimmy Carter in 1977 with 34.1 million viewers and Richard Nixon in 1973 with 33 million viewers. Bill Clinton in 1993 saw 29.7 million people tune in, while George W. Bush in 2001, inaugurated after the closest election in history, attracted 29 million viewers.
Changes in the way people watch television also have to be considered when evaluating ratings performances — the inauguration also was streamed on YouTube and across other platforms, and that viewership was not counted in the total average.
Controversy already has sprang up around the numbers of people who attended the inauguration in Washington, D.C., on Friday. No official numbers have been offered, but some news organizations speculated based on photos.
The New York Times posted pictures of both crowds, each taken about 45 minutes before the start of official ceremonies, and asked crowd-control consultant Professor Keith Still of the Manchester Metropolitan University in England to give his analysis. Still estimated that the crowd on Friday was about one-third the size of the crowd that showed up to see Obama inaugurated in 2009.
That said, Trump is not popular in Democratic-leaning Washington, D.C., which also has a high density of African-American citizens, and that likely dampened local enthusiasm for the new president.
The issue of crowd size kept being discussed all weekend. On Saturday evening, White House spokesman Sean Spicer scolded the press, saying that some photos were “intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.”
Spicer, who said that Trump would continue to take his message directly to the American people, did not take questions from the press.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer said.
On Sunday morning, Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, and anchor Chuck Todd asked her: “The presidency is about choices so I’m curious why President Trump chose yesterday to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd size. So I guess my question to you is why do that?”
Conway responded: “And on this matter of crowd size, I mean, for me I think the most quantifiable points of interest for Americans should be what just happened a few months ago that brought him here, the 31 of 50 states he won, the 2,600 counties, the 200 counties that went for President Obama that now went to President Trump. And the fact that 29, 30 million women voted for Donald Trump for president. They should be respected. Somebody should cover their voices as well.”
Todd didn’t let Conway get away with this answer, saying that she wasn’t answering the question. That led to a long back and forth, which can be watched below.
Meanwhile, millions of people took to the streets in cities across the globe to rally for women’s rights and to protest the incoming administration. In Washington, D.C. alone, more than 500,000 people went to the National Mall to march, and they were joined by protesters all over the world.
READ MORE: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, CNN, ABC
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