60 MINUTES Interview With Navy Seal Scores High Ratings for CBS

The 60 MINUTES interview with a former Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden drew the largest non-football audience of the week, placing the CBS News magazine at #7 in viewers behind only football games or pre- and post-football shows. Scott Pelley’s interview with the author of the only first-hand account of the mission that killed the al-Qaeda leader attracted an audience of 12.32 million viewers, according to Nielsen live-plus-same-day ratings for Sunday, Sept. 9.

The broadcast also finished at #6 in households, posting an 8.0/13 in that category.

Compared to the same night last year, America’s #1 news program was up +52% in viewers, +55% in adults 25-54 and +62% in adults 18-49.

In a rare occurrence, the interview with “Mark Owen,” the pseudonym for the retired Navy SEAL who wrote No Easy Day, comprised the entire hour of Sunday’s 60 MINUTES.

“Owen,” whom CBS News will not identify for security reasons, was made up by a professional makeup artist to disguise his appearance and sound was manipulated to alter his voice.

"60 Minutes," the most successful television broadcast in history, began its 44th season on Sept. 25, 2011. 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 2011, regularly making Nielsen's Top 10. Over the 2010-2011 season, "60 Minutes" continued its dominance as the number-one news program, drawing an average of 13.36 million viewers per week – a 1 percent increase over last season, more than twice the audiences of its network news magazine competitors and more than five 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.

CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager is the executive producer of 60 MINUTES.