Biden's First Address to Congress Drew 50% Less Views Than Donald Trump's Among Big 4 Networks
President Joe Biden’s first remarks before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night saw a roughly 50 percent decline in viewers when compared to former President Donald Trump’s first such speech in 2017.
How is it that a man who is supposedly one of the most popular presidents in modern history, at least by whichever standards the corrupt mainstream media uses, can’t seem to attract viewers? According to Deadline, interest in watching Biden speak for hours about his first 100 days in office and the radical policies he’s proposing saw a major drop-off when compared to Trump with regard to ratings on four major networks.
Per numbers shared by Deadline, Biden’s big night Wednesday went the way of this year’s historically low-rated Academy Awards, and last year’s abysmal NBA Finals.
“In unadjusted fast affiliate data, the President’s speech drew around 11.6 million viewers in the 9 PM ET hour. Add, Univision (1.08 million) and Telemundo (884,000) to that batch of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the result inches up to 13.5 million for the speech that started around 9:10 PM ET,” the outlet reported.
By contrast, Trump always attracted viewers, especially in his first State of the Union address.
“[T]he President’s highly anticipated speech was a fairly polished performance on a very big stage that caught a lot of Americans’ attention — around 22.7 million actually. That’s up over 25% from what Barack Obama’s final SOTU drew among the Big 4 back on January 14, 2016,” Deadline reported on March 1, 2017.
The outlet further noted the decline in interest in watching the new president speak, even when ratings for cable news were included.
“Joe Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress drew 22.6 million viewers across seven major networks. That’s a drop of 47% from 43 million or so who tuned in to Donald Trump’s first speech to a joint session, on February. 28, 2017, across those seven networks,” the entertainment industry site reported Thursday.
“According to fast national numbers from Nielsen, ABC topped coverage with 4.03 million, followed by MSNBC with 3.94 million, NBC with 3.54 million, CBS with 3.37 million, CNN with 3.18 million, Fox News with 2.92 million and Fox with 1.63 million,” Dateline concluded.
Those with political motives to prop up Biden and his radical and underwhelming comments Wednesday might point to ratings as irrelevant metrics. They might say that Biden is so calm, so steady and so trustworthy, that people feel content with tuning out and doing other things.
However, even a CNN poll would dispute such a notion.
Among CNN viewers polled Thursday and in 2017, Trump’s message was more warmly received. Of CNN viewers quizzed, 57 percent had a positive reaction to Trump’s remarks in 2017.
View of speech watchers, per CNN poll. The speech watchers tonight overall leaned Democratic. pic.twitter.com/9VslE8ir7Z
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 29, 2021
Biden’s comments were warmly received by 51 percent of the network’s own viewers.
Then there is the anecdotal evidence, where Twitter noted that Biden’s address was not warmly received by those who watched it on various streams on YouTube.
Biden is getting ratio’d on YouTube. Everyone hated his address. pic.twitter.com/Yrz9Ynfo4o
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 29, 2021
81 million votes, America.? pic.twitter.com/vlDL4VcnXE
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) April 29, 2021
But sure, Biden is the most popular president in modern history, and he’s doing a wonderful job at unifying the country. Never mind that he can’t get anyone to tune in to his socially distant and reality-detached primetime address and not even a majority of Americans, per polling from Rasmussen Reports released Thursday, think he won the election fairly.
48% of voters say Biden won the election fairly last November . . .https://t.co/RieKiko3ID pic.twitter.com/SCGo2nEFq1
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) April 29, 2021
Maybe there is something about watching fully vaccinated radicals parade around in masks, as viewers are simultaneously promised that vaccines work, that turns people off. Perhaps the low viewership was related to how badly Democrats undermined election integrity in the months leading up to the November election.
In any event, Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress was a complete disaster — both in substance and in the numbers.
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