Rating the Mueller Report
“I mean I totally underestimated the degree to which people would just get sick of 24-hour-a-day talk television and talk radio and then the degree to which this whole scandal became just sort of disgusting by sheer repetition,” the Speaker of the House muttered as impeachment talk swirled…
Actually, hold that thought for a minute. The ratings are in for the Mueller report reveal, and after two years of angst and hype they were…above average.
The release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference drove a big day for TV news — albeit not as big as coverage of some of the events connected to the investigation.
Special coverage of the report Thursday morning averaged about 10.7 million viewers across the three big cable news networks — Fox News, MSNBC and CNN — and broadcast nets ABC and CBS, according to preliminary Nielsen figures. (NBC’s numbers weren’t available as of publication time.)
Fox News led the pack with an average of 2.78 million viewers from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET. CBS, which cut off its coverage at noon, drew 2.54 million, followed by ABC with 2.22 million. MSNBC averaged a little more than 2 million viewers and CNN, 1.17 million.
The broadcast networks topped the key news demographic of adults 25-54, with ABC (493,000 viewers in that age group) and CBS (471,000) beating the 441,000 for Fox News. Fox’s demo audience led its cable competition by a sizable margin, as MSNBC had 307,000 adults 25-54 and CNN 286,000.
The cable news networks were all above average during their special reports, but the Mueller report’s release was not as big a TV draw as some other recent events that drew blanket coverage — including a couple that figured into the special counsel’s investigation.
Coverage of former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony in February, for instance, averaged 16 million viewers. Back
in 2017, former FBI director James Comey’s testimony about his firing drew 19.5 million.Even when NBC is added in, the Mueller report coverage isn’t likely to reach those heights.
For perspective, the ratings timeline goes 19.5M viewers for James Comey two years ago, 16M two months ago, and 10M this week. Any way you want to slice it, ratings are trending down. That could mean a couple of things, but chief among them are that the public, either through having made up their mind or growing tired of the story or both, has waning interest in watching wall-to-wall coverage of it.
That quote at the top from the Speaker of the House was Newt Gingrich, right after the Republicans gave up the first losses in a midterm to an incumbent president’s party in a generation in 1998, and then embarking on the ill-fated impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. But there is a lesson there for today. I don’t know what the number for the super hardcore politically active population in America is, but I’m betting the 10 million watching the Mueller coverage on Thursday isn’t far off. Folks for the most part have made up their mind regarding Mueller, President Trump, and all things associated with it, and those who have not made up their minds probably don’t care enough either way to worry about. The great unknown is no matter the offenses, the lies, the spin, or the screaming to save the Republic, everyone has a burnout point where they just start getting numb to it, and we are starting to see some data points on folks reaching theirs.
Following politics can be quite the bubble to be in, and ratings don’t tell the whole story, but they are useful in this case because we can get a sense of demarcation where the casual news consumer tunes in and when it’s the uber politicos who are most engaged. Clearly the latter is who was watching on Thursday, something everyone who is plotting strategy going forward should consider.
Another possible consideration is that Barr had already told everyone what the report’s conclusions were, that it found no collusion and reached no decision on obstruction, and that he wouldn’t be moving forward with anything except working on the redactions. So when it did get released, there was no anticipated there there, and thus no interest in listening to pundits talking breathlessly about a non event stemming from what amounted to nothing.
Fiery testimony about an approaching asteroid that might hit us will generate a lot of coverage, but the release of a report on an asteroid that whizzed harmlessly past us last month will not.
We should get another data point next month with DoJ IG Horowitz’s report comes out, and if that leads to any trials, plenty of additional data points.
It may take decades, but eventually even this story will fade.
LA Times obits
He was the former CIA agent who led the four Cubans in the break in. He died in 2017 but nobody realized it until yesterday. Obviously this Russian collusion nonsense has kept Bob Woodward way too distracted to keep his eye on the real criminals. I mean, G Gordon Liddy hasn’t tweeted in seven months, so shouldn’t a top reporter being figuring out why? The last thing he posted was in response to a Trump clip back in August, where Liddy said:
And then not another peep from him. Seems pretty strange to me!Report
There’s no point reading Moby Dick once you know that Ishmael survives.Report
That’s why I stopped reading at “Call me Ismael. Some years ago…”
I thought “Okay, he’s fine, I can skip this one.”
I’d have started the book with something like “So there I was, three harpoons in my back, a wooden leg stuck in my teeth, and Belinda off eating squid in Bali.”Report
“So I’m pretty much fucked. Clinging to this damn wooden box in the middle of the North Atlantic–or is it the South? I can’t even remember anymore, it’s been so long. This thing’s rocking worse, might not make it. I guess I should’ve said ‘no’ when that big guy asked if I needed a roommate…”Report
“We were somewhere around Cuba on the edge of the Sargasso when the blubber began to take hold.”Report
“It is a truth widely acknowledged that a man in possession of a dangerous obsession must be in want of a cabin boy..”Report
This sub thread is so much win. ^_^Report
A related piece of news: both the O’Rourke and Warren campaigns said they are getting almost no questions about the Mueller report on the campaign trail. Out of hundreds. People just don’t care.Report
Sure, in *IOWA*.Report
It just confirms everyone’s priors. The majority of people already knew that it was a corrupt campaign that led to a corrupt presidency, while his fans would’t be convinced by a signed confession, due to the well-known leftist bias of notaries.Report
Right at this moment, Andrew Yang is holding a rally at Pershing Square, one block from my house.
I walked past on my way home, and thought about stopping by just to ask a question about the Mueller report.Report