’60 Minutes’ Audience Sinks to Surprising Low Without Football

CBS’s “60 Minutes” drew 5.64 million viewers on Sunday, one of its smallest audiences in years, while its audience among viewers aged 25 to 54 fell to 558,000. The figures matter because the programme usually ranks first among non-sports broadcast shows and is an important lead-in to CBS’s Sunday evening schedule.

The episode aired without a strong NFL lead-in and faced a late football game on Fox. Compared with the year-earlier broadcast, which had a stronger football lead-in, overall viewership was down 60% and the 25-to-54 audience fell 81%; since 2000, a sixth episode of a season had not previously fallen below seven million viewers overall and one million in that age group. The programme examined deportations under the Trump administration and interviewed Colorado Governor Jared Polis and Tina Peters, whose sentence he commuted.