2015: The year politics trumped sports on cable

[Commentary] For cable news, 2015 was big. In fact, it was huge. And it was all thanks to the 2016 presidential election. The slew of presidential primary debates, both Republican and Democrat, pushed Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network to ratings heights they had never seen in their histories, which in CNN’s case stretches back to 1980.

The primary debates of 2015 brought in a whopping cumulative total of more than 120 million viewers, with more debates still to come. About 24 million people watched the first GOP primary debate on Fox News in August, and 23 million watched CNN’s GOP primary debate in September. Those are numbers matched only by NFL football games, which average in the mid-20 millions, depending on the network, and surpass just about everything else on TV. According to a December Pew report, almost 70 percent of Americans have watched at least one of the six primary debates in 2015. By comparison, the biggest television event of the year, the Super Bowl, is watched by about 71 percent of Americans who turn on their televisions on Super Bowl Sunday.