On August 6, 2015, Fox News hosted the first Republican presidential primary debate of the 2016 cycle at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. The moderators were Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace. Within a day the network’s handling of the event, and the audience it drew, had become a media story of its own.
The Fox moderators’ questions drew wide attention. Nielsen data showed an audience that set records for a primary debate and for the network.
The format and the moderators
According to Ballotpedia’s account, Fox and Facebook sponsored the debate. Questions came from the three moderators and from Facebook users. Wallace said more than 40,000 Facebook users had submitted questions.
Ten of the 17 major candidates took the main stage. Fox announced the participants on August 4, 2015. It said it had averaged five national polls to pick them: Bloomberg, CBS News, Fox News, Monmouth and Quinnipiac. Candidates who missed the top ten were invited to a separate forum at 5 p.m. Eastern on the day of the debate.
Fortune reported that the debate was contentious. It said the moderators, Kelly especially, pressed the candidates with tough questions. Salon quoted two of Kelly’s questions, one asking a candidate when he became a Republican and another about abortion. Fox chief Roger Ailes told Politico after the debate that he was proud of all the moderators. He said they asked tough, important questions and did their job as journalists.
Donald Trump, in his first debate, said afterward that the Fox moderators had asked him unfair questions. In a post on Twitter the next day, he told the network it should be ashamed of itself. He wrote that he had delivered its highest debate ratings and that it said only negative things in return. In a CNN interview that Friday, he credited himself for the audience size.
The ratings
CNN Money’s Brian Stelter reported on August 7, 2015, that Nielsen data showed 24 million viewers for the Thursday night debate. He called it the highest-rated primary debate in television history. A Fox News spokeswoman said it was also the most-watched telecast in the nearly 20-year history of the Fox News Channel.
Overnight figures released earlier that day had suggested a large audience. Salon reported a 16.0 household rating between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. in metered markets. The final Nielsen figures, released Friday, confirmed a far bigger audience than previous primary debates. Nielsen reported that 7.9 million of the viewers were aged 25 to 54, the key advertising demographic.
Fortune put the number in context. It said 24 million was 500,000 more than watched Game 7 of the previous year’s World Series, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Mike Memoli. It was nearly equal to the biggest “Sunday Night Football” game of the previous season, which drew 24.3 million. Another 6.1 million viewers watched the 5 p.m. forum for candidates who missed the main stage. Agence France-Presse’s report, carried by the Borneo Post, described the debate as the highest-rated non-sports telecast in cable television history.
Before the debate, CNN Money reported, rival executives and campaign aides had predicted unusually high ratings. They cited curiosity about Trump and the controversy over the “top ten” criteria.
What followed
The Fox figure became the benchmark for the debates that followed. CNN’s September 2015 debate averaged 23 million viewers, according to Nielsen data cited by CNN Money. In past cycles, debates at this stage had averaged 3 million to 5 million viewers. CNBC’s October 2015 debate averaged 14 million, a record for that business news channel but well below the first two.
CBS News noted in March 2016 that Fox’s Detroit debate drew about 16.9 million viewers, the most of any debate that year to that point. It added that the August 2015 debate remained the highest-rated non-sports cable broadcast ever.