Irene Brought the Weather Channel Its Best Ratings Ever

Whether warranted or not, the hype delivered viewers

We already knew that a lot of people watched the Weather Channel for their Hurricane Irene coverage over the weekend. Brian Stelter at The New York Times reports on the official numbers:

Ratings for the channel soared over the weekend as Irene made landfall three times along the East Coast. Saturday represented the channel’s highest-rated whole day in its history. For a quarter-hour that day, as Irene soaked the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the channel had more than four million viewers, surpassing its peak quarter-hour viewership of 3.93 million during Hurricane Katrina.

That beats Fox News's and CNN's ratings by a million viewers. Hype or no hype, that's a lot of eyeballs watching the rain fall. Too many? Ask the media critics--they can't stop arguing about it.