Stormy Daniels Bags Best ’60 Minutes’ Ratings Since Obamas Post-Election Sit-Down In ’08

Stormy Daniels Bags Best ’60 Minutes’ Ratings Since Obamas Post-Election Sit-Down In ’08

Stormy Daniels’ 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper looks to be the newsmag’s best since Steve Kroft’s interview with Barack and Michelle Obama in November of 2008, shortly after he was elected president, based on overnights.

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That decade-old interview had attracted 24.5 million viewers devoting all three segments to the president-elect and his wife.

Interest in Daniels’ story had been running high for weeks, and reached a crescendo Sunday. Several hours after the interview wrapped, the porn star who claims to have had an affair with now-president Donald Trump was broadcast, still was No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in the United States. In Sunday’s broadcast, Daniels for the first time described the alleged attack she says a man made against her in 2011 in a Vegas parking lot, unless she dropped her story, after she had agreed to tell all to a tabloid.

Daniels also said for the first time that she wasn’t attracted to Trump, which some pundits predicted might trigger a Trump twitter tirade this morning.

Daniels’ controversial and much-dissected two-segment sit-down with Cooper started about 35 minutes late on the East Coast, due to NCAA basketball game overrun, throwing off early metered-market data. Number crunchers suggest 60 Minutes hit 16.3/27 in metered markets, which would mark a big night for Stormy, being way up compared to previous Sunday’s 7.6/13.

In advance of Sunday’s broadcast, Daniels’ very media-savvy attorney, Michael Avenatti worked overtime plugging the interview, while CBS News released just one maddening 10-second tease in which Daniels did not open her mouth and Cooper said he was unsure why she was doing the interview.

In the walk-up to Sunday’s pre-taped interview there had been much speculation as to whether it would join the pantheon of “most watched” news interviews.

Presidential scandals tend to do well.

When Barbara Walters interviewed Monica Lewinsky on 20/20 in March of 1999, about her affair with President Bill Clinton, it attracted an average of 48.5 million viewers; an estimated 70 million people watched at least six minutes of that two-hour interview program. Lewinsky did the interview to push sales of her just-published book, ”Monica’s Story.”

But other interviews have attracted mobs. An average of 62 million people who watched Oprah Winfrey’s 90-minute interview with Michael Jackson in 1993, causing then-ABC Entertainment president chief Ted Harbert to beam to NYT, “This is why God invented network television.” However, that live interview had not aired as a news broadcast, with Winfrey reportedly owning future rights.

For more recent ratings comparison, in April of 2015, Diane Sawyer’s much anticipated 20/20 sit-down with then-Bruce Jenner, in which he confirmed reports he was transitioning to a woman, clocked an average of 16.9M viewers.