Opinion: Fox News was the go-to news channel for Obama’s Afghanistan speech

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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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