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Opinionated news dominates cable television last week

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the Voices of Hope Children’s Choir appear on stage during “America’s Got Talent,” in Pasadena, Calif. The talent competition series dominated the ratings last week.

Cable television networks offer sports, reality, comedy and drama. But what’s selling now is opinionated news.

Sixteen of the 17 most-watched programs on cable last week were either on Fox News Channel or MSNBC, the Nielsen company said. The only exception was coverage of the NBA draft on ESPN.

Three editions of Sean Hannity’s show on Fox were the three most-watched programs. Fox and MSNBC were the two highest-rated cable news networks for the week, and Fox News did better than Fox’s broadcast entertainment network.

For broadcasters, NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” is clearly the summer’s most dominant show, with a margin of more than 4 million viewers over any other program.

Despite the “Talent” head start, CBS was the week’s most popular network in prime time, averaging 4.3 million viewers. NBC had 4.1 million, ABC had 3.4 million, Fox had 2.1 million, Univision had 1.5 million, ION Television had 1.4 million, Telemundo had 1.1 million and the CW had 810,000.

Fox News averaged 2.45 million viewers in prime time. MSNBC had 1.73 million, USA had 1.45 million, ESPN had 1.42 million and HGTV had 1.39 million.