The Nielsen company said that was the number of people watching ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC during the hour that ended at 9 p.m. on the East Coast. That’s when police announced that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KHAR’tsahr-NEYE’-ehv) had been taken into custody after hiding in a boat.
Nielsen said that’s roughly double the amount of people who are watching one of those channels on a typical Friday night.
The networks aired wall-to-wall coverage Friday night, averaging 35.9 million people for all of prime-time.