CBS's 60 MINUTES Finishes Up +1% in Viewers for 2016-17 Season

60 MINUTES finished its 49th season up +1 percent in viewers - the only broadcast newsmagazine to gain audience over the 2016-2017 television season. The CBS newsmagazine is averaging 12.39 million viewers, according to the current Nielsen estimates. It ended last season averaging 12.3 million.

Once again, 60 MINUTES finished the week in the Top 10, drawing 8.25 million viewers to land at #9, according to Nielsen live plus same day ratings for Sunday, May 21. It was the 22nd time this season that 60 MINUTES made Nielsen's Top 10 weekly programs list - 16 times landing at #5 or better.

Sunday's 60 MINUTES featured Scott Pelley's report about cities and houses of worship offering illegal immigrants sanctuary, Lesley Stahl's story on the Cook County Jail in Chicago and Holly Williams' profile of Chinese activist artist Ai Weiwei.

Jeff Fager is the executive producer of 60 MINUTES, America's most-watched news program. 60 MINUTES, the most successful television broadcast in history, began its 49th season in September 2016. Offering hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, feature segments and profiles of people in the news, the broadcast begun in 1968 is still a hit in 2016, making Nielsen's Top 10 nearly every week. Over the 2015-2016 season, 60 MINUTES continued its dominance as the number-one news program, drawing an average of 12.3 million viewers per week - almost twice the audience of its nearest network news magazine competitor and three million viewers ahead of the most-watched daily network evening news broadcast. The average audience for a 60 MINUTES broadcast still dwarfs the biggest audiences drawn by cable news programs.