Who watched the TV broadcasts of the
Republican and Democratic conventions?
The short answer is: not too many
people
More than 85% of adults in America
didn’t bother to watch either of the nominees giving the big acceptance speech.
Fox News had the biggest average
audience for all eight nights of the Republican and Democratic conventions—but,
hold on, only 1.8% of adults were watching Fox on a given night.
Possibly we’re having the most
emotionally charged presidential election of all time—Tom Jefferson and Andy
Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt didn’t have television to deal with. It’s scarcely
credible, but nevertheless, most Americans didn’t give a hoot about watching
those big speeches. Obviously, most Americans didn’t learn anything much from
them.
For the seeming endless hours of
convention coverage by the broadcast and cable channels, much of the time only
a tiny minority of Americans was watching, regardless of the pompous blather of
Wolf and Rachel and Megyn and all the others.
While I’m on this topic, I’ll give a
thumbs down to TheHill.com, which blasted this headline on its website
yesterday: “Trump tops Clinton on speech ratings” and to TheHill writer Joe
Concha, who started his story with “Donald Trump has defeated Hillary Clinton…”
The underlying details tell a much less provocative story.
Here’s the detail: Trump had a reported
audience of 34.9 million people, and Clinton’s audience was 33.3 million. The
audience ratings are reported from a survey sample of about 5,000 viewers. I
have long experience in the design of surveys, and I feel real comfortable
guessing that the margin of error in this audience report makes it ludicrous to
say one candidate “tops” another, or one candidate “has defeated” another. The
viewing audience for Trump and Clinton was close to being the same, probably no
significant difference between them.
In their convention coverage, the media
generally didn’t take any opportunity to minimize the hype or the preposterous
emphasis on discord.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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