Fox News was the go-to news channel for Obama's Afghanistan speech

The first batch of TV ratings are in for President Obama's speech about Afghanistan on Tuesday night. Fox News romped the other 24-hour news networks.

Fox News had 4.55-million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. CNN came in second with 2.35 million, followed by MSNBC with 1.56 million.

Overall, Obama's speech drew 40.77-million viewers. By comparison, this year's Oscars drew 36-million viewers.

The speech, which aired on 10 television networks, was Obama's seventh prime-time appearance this year.  His audience Tuesday was 27% larger than his last prime-time appearance, when he addressed a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9.

A ratings breakdown for the major networks isn't in yet.

Nielsen says it will soon roll online viewership statistics into its reports, which is good because that's where I watched the speech last night.

Immediately after the address, Fox News' viewership reached as much as 5.22 million for its analysis, which, as you can imagine, tore Obama's plan to shreds.

Here's the Ticket's take on the speech. And here's a sampling of the Twitter world's reactions in less than 140 characters.

For those who missed it, we also have the unedited text of Obama's speech.

-- Mark Milian

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Photo credit: Roger L. Wollenberg / EPA

Comments

[George]

Why do so many people watch the news that "isn't real news"? Ironically since the Obama administration has labeled Fox that way, Fox's ratings are sky high, and the network that most agrees with Obama MSNBC is in the tank. Is there a message here? You bet.

[Mike Zarowitz]

I'm more of a Fox viewer than anything else, but I thought CNN by far had the best analysis panel. It was more like real thinking people instead of what tends to the more extremes-no middle positions (Fox) or plain old "feeding time at the big cat house" (MS-NBC) one usually finds.