More than a million Norwegians were glued to their televisions Monday night when both state broadcaster NRK and the national commercial station TV2 carried non-stop coverage of the parliamentary election and its results. NRK won the ratings battle hands down.
Fully 949,000 viewers tuned in to NRK just from 9-11pm, when election returns started coming in. Around 410,000 kept watching well past midnight and even until 2am, to watch a traditional late-night meeting of all party leaders at the Parliament, at which election results were discussed.
That gave NRK market shares of 68.6 and 72.1 percent respectively, with the largest number of viewers watching at 9.04pm when the first election result prognosis appeared on the screen. The marathon broadcast was hosted by journalists Ingerid Stenvold and Ingunn Solheim, with colleagues reporting from all the political parties’ election gatherings and lots of commentators in the studios.
Challenger TV2 reported an average of 129,000 viewers on both its main channel and its special news channel TV2 Nyhetskanalen between 8:55pm and 1:50am. TV2‘s election result projections were more in line with actual results, however, than NRK’s. The election races were close, with the left-center parties in Parliament ultimately prevailing over the non-socialist side of Norwegian politics.
newsinenglish.no staff
