Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly Rule Cable TV Ratings While Anderson Cooper Shows Slight Increase

Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly are once again the ratings king and queen for the previous week. However, Bill O’Reilly remains far ahead of Kelly and the others.

When averaging ratings for the week from figures based on Zap2it, Bill O’Reilly averaged 2.45 million viewers a night. His biggest night was Tuesday, where he scored 2.55 million viewers and his lowest was on Thursday, when he had 2.28 million viewers.

Even though Megyn Kelly‘s ratings weren’t as high as those of Bill O’Reilly, she has nothing to cry about. Kelly averaged 2.08 million viewers for the previous week. Her biggest night was Monday, where she had 2.3 million viewers and her lowest night was Thursday with 1.96 million viewers.

As usual, Bill O’Reilly had another week of controversy as he went face to face with a South Carolina politician who accused O’Reilly and Fox News of inspiring the race-related shootings at a church in Charleston. Todd Rutherford told O’Reilly that the gunman likely heard coded language to insult African Americans on Fox News. O’Reilly was shocked that Rutherford presumed that the gunman actually watched Fox News.

Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly interviewed Dr. Ben Carson about whether President Obama and Hillary Clinton used the right tone to respond to the horrific shooting in Charleston.

“Certainly not the tone that I would have adopted. I think we have to start is going to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is not guns. The heart of the matter is the heart. The heart and soul of people. You know, this young man didn’t wake up yesterday and suddenly turn into a maniac.”

Carson went on to tell Megyn Kelly that his background and upbringing, not guns, led to the shooter’s actions. Carson, like Kelly, believes we need to start installing the right kinds of values in our young people.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper had a lot to say about the shootings as well and it probably helped his ratings a little bit. He improved from an average of 530,000 viewers a night two weeks ago to 720,000 in the previous week. On Thursday, Cooper scored one of his biggest ratings nights of the year with 1.04 million viewers. His lowest night was Monday with an audience of 695,000.

You can bet with the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, both Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly will introduce controversial topics and rule the ratings once again. However, based on ratings from the past several weeks, it is easy to predict that Bill O’Reilly, once again, will be the king of cable news viewers.

[Photos by Larry Busacca and Neilson Barnard / Getty Images]