Fox News enjoyed a stellar Thursday, cruising to victory in primetime thanks to a surging Hannity and managing a tie for first with CNN in the daytime ratings for the coveted 25 – 54 age demographic.

The daytime demo stalemate between Fox and CNN found both of them locked at 336,000. MSNBC came in a distant third in the demo, with 197,000 viewers, but edged out CNN for second place in total viewers with 1.40 million to 1.33 million. Fox News took the overall ratings crown in daytime with 2.04 million.

Leading into primetime, Fox News saw a small ratings bump coinciding with one of the now less-frequent coronavirus task force briefings, which pre-empted the first 40 minutes of its 5:00 p.m. broadcast. With President Donald Trump holding court, The Five’s demo ratings essentially held steady from Wednesday, but ticked up from 3.98 million to 4.12 million on Thursday.

In the 8 – 11 p.m. hours, Fox News powered to an impressive victory with 4.30 million overall viewers and 737,000 in the demo, far outpacing CNN (1.81 million; 462,000) and MSNBC (2.38 million; 377,000). Leading the Fox charge was Hannity, which soared past its 8:00 p.m. lead-in in total viewers, pulling in 4.66 million to Tucker Carlson Tonight‘s 4.42 million. The results flip-flopped in the demo, however, with Tucker Carlson’s 806,000 total edging out Sean Hannity’s 779,000.

The Rachel Maddow Show maintained its status as top show on MSNBC, with 3.04 million total viewers and 496,000 in A25 – 54. On CNN, Chris Cuomo Primetime led the network on Friday, though the show was bumped an hour later than its normal 9:00 p.m. slot because of the network’s global coronavirus town hall. In total, Chris Cuomo’s eponymous show garnered 1.92 million overall viewers and 527,000 in the demo.

Lost of goofy grins and some misty-eyed moments of joy: Anderson Cooper is already taking to this new dad thing pretty well.

That’s because at the end of CNN’s coronavirus global town hall on Thursday night, the anchor offered up a very heartfelt and personal bit of much-needed good news. He is now the proud father of a baby boy, born through a surrogate, named Wyatt Morgan Cooper.

“So, I just wanted to take a moment to share with you some joyful news of my own,” Cooper began. “On Monday, I became a father. I’ve never said that out loud and it astonishes me. I am a dad. I have a son, and I want you to meet him. This is Wyatt Cooper. He’s three days old.”

Cooper explained that his son is the namesake of his father, also named Wyatt, and that he chose the middle name, Morgan, because it is a family name on his mother’s side.

“So that’s Wyatt Morgan Cooper, my son. He was…” Cooper said, before trailing off briefly, overcome with emotion over what he had just said out loud. “He was…he was 7.2 pounds at birth, and he is sweet and soft and healthy, and I am beyond happy. As a gay kid, I never thought it would be possible to have a child, and I’m so grateful for all those who paved the way and for the doctors and nurses and everyone involved in my son’s birth. Most of all, I am eternally grateful to a remarkable surrogate who carried Wyatt, watched over him, and gave birth to him.”

“My surrogate has a beautiful family of her own, an amazingly supportive husband. I’m so thankful for the support she has given Wyatt and me,” Cooper said. “I do wish my mom and dad and brother were alive to meet Wyatt, but I like to think they can see him. I imagine them all together…” he said, his voice cracking, “their arms around each other smiling and laughing and watching, looking down on us. Happy that their love is alive in me and Wyatt and that our family continues. New life and new love.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

Tucker Carlson seemed to reveal big news on his Thursday night show when he pointed to a raft of recent studies that found young children cannot spread the coronavirus — but that groundbreaking claim was, in fact, not true, and was debunked on his show by Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel less than 60 seconds later.

The Fox News primetime host began his segment on the latest coronavirus news by saying: “And now to the latest science. There is new evidence that young children do not spread the coronavirus. Not what we thought.”

Mere moments later, Carlson introduced Siegel to expound on the study — and, ultimately, correct the record that Carlson had just botched.

“Tucker, I want to cut through the news and get to the science of this, which is that 78 studies out of the United Kingdom show that children, especially under the age of 10, are not very likely to get Covid-19 or to spread it,” Siegel said, leading off.

“But one of the authors of that study says he’s being a little bit misinterpreted and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has said that one to two percent of the cases, looking at 150,000 cases, were children under the age of 18,” Siegel continued. “The real truth here is, and a China study showed that 90 percent of children have asymptomatic cases, so Tucker, they appear to have a protein in the lungs that protects them from severe disease and almost all of the children who get this are either asymptomatic or have mild cases.”

The doctor then matter-of-factly — but unmistakably — fact-checked Carlson’s inaccurate take on the Covid-19 studies from just a minute before.

“But it is not true that children don’t get it and it is not true that they can’t spread it. Just much less likely than adults,” Siegel confirmed, which elicited a brief “hmm” from Carlson as Siegel moved on to discuss the massive nationwide campaign in pursuit of a coronavirus vaccine.

When Siegel finally finished, Carlson politely thanked him, but did not acknowledge the potential misinformation that the doctor had just prevented from spreading.  The Fox News host then segued into a fact-checking segment, where he acknowledged previous errors made on his Wednesday night program.

Watch above, via Fox News.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired raw, smuggled-out footage of a recent prison riot in Lansing, Kansas, where inmates took control of a cell block to protest a lack of healthcare and three out of four prisoners have now tested positive for the coronavirus.

At the start of her Thursday night show, Maddow explained that she had obtained footage of the riot taken from inside the prison by one of the prisoners, but that after confirmation, felt confident in airing it.

What followed was a shaky, hand-held cell phone video showing disguised prisoners roaming freely around a cell block with no guards present. The narrator walks around showing trash and glass strewn everywhere, barricaded doors, and broken windows and then adds: “They ain’t giving us no healthcare for this coronavirus…They ain’t giving us no help for these motherfuckers. So we have to turn up real quick.”

“It’s a little hurly burly,” Maddow noted. “A video shot by a prisoner, inside Lansing state prison in Kansas. And obviously, what’s going on there is the kind of thing that you would call an uprising, or a riot, or an incident of unrest, depending on your perspective or maybe depending on your politics, but the prisoners there did really tear the place up.”

“As of that morning, the day they started tearing the place up, more than 14 members of the prison staff at Lansing had tested positive and had been sent home from work, 12 prisoners who had tested positive had been moved into a medical isolation unit,” she explained. “Now we have started to get the full, first full picture of what has really happened there, and the riot turns out to be just a crack in the window into this story. On Monday of this week, Lansing correctional facility reported that the first prisoner has died from coronavirus at that facility. Yesterday, Wednesday, the prison reported that a second prisoner had died from coronavirus at that facility.”

Prisoners had been housed up to four in a cell prior to the riot and guards were only wearing cotton masks. As of Wednesday, Maddow went on to add, 75 members of the prison staff have reportedly tested positive at Lansing. In addition, early test results found 75 percent of Lansing inmates now have the virus as well.

“So, when those prisoners in Kansas were rioting,” Maddow noted, “they were in fact, living in a unit where almost all of them would get infected with this disease, within just a couple of weeks. And now two of them thus far are dead.”

“We are far enough into this thing now, that we know where it is likely to be in large numbers. And we know for sure where it spreads the fastest, if we don’t take steps to stop it. We know that now,” an exasperated Maddow notes. “That said, it’s still hard to get tests in this country, even this far into it, even with nearly 63,000 Americans dead from this already, it is still hard to get testing here, but we do know now from watching the contours of this epidemic, from watching the number, watching those red dots on the epidemiological maps sprout all over the country and then zooming in and figuring out where those are, we know now where we ought to be testing, if we only had tests.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.