Yesterday TiVo released the results of an examination of how political party affiliation differs among top rated news and primetime programs. The results are based on viewership for July, fed by TiVo’s Stopwatch ratings service, which compiles from a consumer panel of  35,000 volunteer households.

Most of the information released is categorized by either Republican or Democrat partisanship, so it is difficult to compare how a particular program performed across party lines. The full press release detailing the viewership of 40 programs between the two parties can found here. The partisanship strength for the shows is indicated by an “index,” which I roughly equated to being the 18-49 rating divided by the rating of how many Democrat or Republican households watched the program. The following graph lays out all the results with the  18-49 rating on the horizontal axis and the partisanship index on the vertical axis. The news programs, with their relatively low ratings form a cluster on the upper left while the primetime shows form a file in the lower right.

Unsurprisingly, given current polarization, the news programs as a whole had much higher partisanship indexes than the primetime programs. What was unexpected was to see the CBS Morning News have the highest index among any of the programs. Equally unexpected was to see Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell, a program on HLN (Headline News) to have a higher ratio of Republicans in its audience than any program on Fox News, although Glenn Beck was very close behind. Among the primetime programming two shows made it into the top ten of both the Democrat and Republican indexes: The Closer and Raising the Bar, both on TNT. Perhaps TNT’s new motto should be “Where America comes together.”