Huge tune-in for
Whitney Houston funeral
CNN peaks at 5.4 million viewers as the nation says good-bye
By Toni Fitzgerald
Feb 22, 2012
Millions of viewers tuned into cable news channels and the internet Saturday to watch Whitney Houston's funeral, closing out a week of Houston-focused coverage that
generated huge ratings.
CNN led all networks with an average of 5 million viewers during the three-and-a-half-hour ceremony, according to Nielsen.
The network's audience peaked 5.4 million at 1:30 p.m., 75 minutes after the funeral began. That's a huge audience for any cable network at midday and especially for cable news, whose ratings tend to sag on weekends.
While CNN drew the biggest audience, people also tuned in to Houston funeral coverage on the other cable news networks.
HLN drew 1.42 million for its coverage, while Fox News Channel, usually the dominant news network, averaged 1.38 million.
MSNBC, which has very limited original content on weekends, posted 709,000 viewers during the funeral.
BET and E! also covered Houston's funeral, but ratings were not yet available as of this morning.
The broadcast networks did not carry live coverage of the ceremony, unlike in 2009, when nearly every network covered Michael Jackson's funeral.
There was also a huge audience online, where the Associated Press carried Houston's funeral on AP Live. The ceremony set a record with 2 million unique users, serving up 7.3 million streams.
Houston's death has been the biggest media story to start the new year, spiking ratings for syndicated newsmagazines and
the Grammy Awards, which aired barely 24 hours after her shocking death.
Toxicology reports that will help determine her cause of death will be released in the coming weeks.
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