Hilton Buzz

It wasn’t the audience she might have gotten had talks with broadcast networks not broken down, but Paris Hilton still gave CNN a ratings charge.

About 3.2 million people tuned in to “Larry King Live” Wednesday to watch King query Hilton on her three-week jail term for violating probation on a pled-down DUI charge and how it’s changed her. That’s about three times King’s usual audience, and allowed CNN to score a rare victory over Fox News for the night.

It was also King’s biggest audience since September 2005, when close to 5 million people tuned in for coverage of a JetBlue flight’s emergency landing in Los Angeles. The Hilton interview was on par with King’s sitdown with former Star Jones Reynolds a year ago, which drew 3 million viewers.

The Hilton interview did well demographically too; 1.4 million of the Paris-watchers were adults 25-54, the target age group for the news networks. That beat all comers among the three cable news channels in primetime.

Hilton ended up on King’s show after negotiations for an interview with NBC or ABC fell apart in the days before her Tuesday release from an L.A. County jail. Reports that NBC was willing to pay up to $1 million for the interview — which the network flatly denied — raised the hackles of a number of media critics. Both broadcast networks eventually washed their hands of the idea.

[Source: Zap 2 it]

[Photo Credit: Paris Hilton Online]