Nielsen Numbers For Inauguration

We already knew that the crowd that showed up to see the president take his oath of office last Monday was down from four years ago. There were only about 800,000 this year (as compared to well over a million in 2009). But Democrats shouldn't feel bad, since crowds are normally less for a second term inauguration -- and the crowd was still nearly twice as big as George W. Bush could muster for his second term.

Now the Nielsen rating service has released the preliminary numbers for those watching the inauguration on television. Those numbers were also down (but still above the numbers for Bush). Here are the numbers:

NBC....................5.08 million
ABC....................4.57 million
CBS....................3.67 million
CNN....................3.14 million
MSNBC................2.27 million
FNC....................1.32 million