Impeachment Gets Wall-to-Wall Coverage, So So Ratings
Creator: Trikosko, Marion S., photographer; Related Name: O'Halloran, Thomas J. , photographer [Public domain]
The ratings are in for the first public impeachment hearings in 20 years:
It was just by a hair, but the debut of the impeachment hearings against Donald Trump yesterday beat Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress earlier this year …barely.
With a grand total of 13,098,000 Americans tuning in to watch the televised opening of the House Select Committee on Intelligence questioning on Wednesday, Ambassador William Taylor and Deputy Secretary of State George Kent topped the 12.9 million who saw the former FBI Director’s circumspect stint in the hot seat on July 25.
Having said that with Nielsen numbers from Fox News Channel. MSNBC, ABC, CNN, CBS and NBC now in, the 10 AM – 3:30 PM ET hearing stumbled against another big ticket testimony. The Wednesday event, that the former Celebrity Apprentice host insists he didn’t watch, was down a hard 32% from the audience that eyed pink slipped FBI Director James Comey’s appearance before our elected representatives in June 2017.
Of note, Fox News lead all networks with 2.9 Million viewers, followed by MSNBC (2.7 million), ABC (2 million), CBS (1.9 million), CNN (1.85 million), and NBC (1.7 million). The number was close the the viewship of the Mueller testimony, and nearly 32% less than the 2017 testimony of James Comey, the highest-rated congressional testimony of the Trump Administration.
Things that are on when people need to work get smaller viewings than average! I don’t quite get the so-so ratings thing. I am pro-impeachment but not watching because I need to work. Plus GOP antics would not be good for my blood pressure.
The majority of Americans still support the impeachment inquiry. There is something horse racey about discussing the ratings over the substance. The call Sonderland made from the restaurant for example. I am old enough to remember when the very serious people were shocked and horrified by allegedly less than stellar e-mail practices, back in, checkes mores, 2016.*
*she was completely exonerated though but what ya gonna do.Report
The highly technical and scientific term of “so so” was used hear since, as you point out, daytime ratings are different, and these hearings where far off the pace of the James Comey testimony, which occurred at the same time of day and thus would be a fair comparison.Report
I suspect they also don’t account for folks streaming the hearings on on computer screen while working on the other. Throw that crowd in, and I suspect it gets much higher.Report
I think Saul is right on the ratings. As much as I’d love to watch them work makes it impossible.
Of course I do find I’m having a really hard time figuring out where the public is and I just dont trust polling that much. I mean, I know where my zip code is and similar zip codes but I also don’t think that means much in the greater scheme of this issue.Report
We just aren’t going to know about impact for about a week. Then if there is an effect it should start showing up in Trumps approval ratings. If he stays within a point or three of where he’s at that’s minimal impact. If he drops down into the high 30’s for approval rating that’s a definite impact and also a major headache for the GOP because if Trump drops into the 30’s and they acquit him they’re falling into “possibly lose the Senate” territory.Report
The problem is always that high ratings mean high engagement and low ratings mean nothing.
We have to be able to compare these numbers to the numbers that we think that the numbers should be and then say “Wow! These numbers are higher than I thought they’d be!” or “Crap, These numbers are lower than I thought they’d be!” or “Ha! I’m so good at this!”
So I mostly look for people explaining that while people might think that something is bad, they don’t have enough context to conclude things.
If two (or more) things could happen, A or B, and A would be an unqualified good, look to see what explanations are given for B… but don’t limit it to happening just once. If this thing iterates over and over and over again and there are plenty of opportunities for the one indicator that everybody agrees would be the good indicator to show up but, for whatever reason, the indicators that are not the one indicator that everybody agrees would be the good indicator shows up instead… look to see if there’s always an explanation for why the indicator that showed up instead doesn’t mean anything.Report
I’m honestly not sure how ratings are measured nowadays. Like back in the day when the only way to watch proceedings was to tune your TV set into one of three networks Neilson was able to record how many sets were tuned in.
I see the proceedings via embedded streaming on blogs or via my WaPo subscription. So am I counted in the ratings? I don’t know.Report
I strongly suspect that the people most inclined to watch are also the people who matter the least. We all already have an opinion that isn’t going to change.Report
Roger Stone convicted. Ken Starr complained on Fox News that it was only a process crime. Irony died again for the one billionth time.Report
Insert meme of HRC rolling her eyes and saying “Bitch, Please”.Report
Remember, “it’s okay if you are a Republican.”Report
Today in bad faith arguments:
Laura Ingram comlained that “attempted bribery” is not in the Constitution. Maybe I only went to a T2 law school but I remember covering inchoate crimes in criminal law. Year 1 criminal law.
She merely uses her law degree to provide a veneer of respectability to her authoritarianism.
I can think of who in OT is gonna to write “how dare you accuse them of bad faith!”Report
by that logic nearly all the criminal code is not in the Constitution. Which means all the “criminal acts” Sec. Clinton was accused of shouldn’t have been investigated since they aren’t criminal by that definition.
But @LeeEsq is right – its always ok if you are Republican.Report
“Bribery” is just a talking point Democrats came up with in a focus group, as reported today in the Washington Post. It’s not a real charge that they can establish, just like their use of “extortion” and “quid pro quo”, which they’re abandoning.
A half-way competent prosecution starts out with evidence of a violation of a criminal code, and then proceeds to the who, what, why, and where. Democrats are trying to do this backwards, deciding to accuse someone, then accusing him (constantly), then making sure that only their own accusations can be discussed and that the accused isn’t allowed to provide any of his own evidence, and then flailing around to find something they want to accuse him of. So what we’ve got is, at best, an amusing court room scene that was cut from Idiocracy (2006). Maybe they’ve got some kind of “Legal Jeopardy” board game and they’re flicking a spinner. “You’re charged with…. zzzzz…. Inchoate bribery!”Report
Mistermix, over at Balloon Juice, agrees with you…in a sense:
“First, is there an Occam’s Razor for goobers? Maybe Gomer’s Butter Knife? Because the Republican Committee Counsel is a real fucking goober, asking pointless questions and running himself into corners like a haywire Roomba. So, either he’s an idiot, or he was on some kind of leash. I think Gomer’s Butter Knife would dictate that the answer is both: he’s not that smart (because a smart person wouldn’t want the job) and morons like Nunez have him on a leash.”
Trump continues to Tweet out high crimes and misdemeanors on a daily basis (today threatening a witness) and everyone keeps insisting this cannot be the case, since no one could be that stupid.
But Gomer’s Butterknife says that yes, yes he can.Report
Obviously Mistermix isn’t a lawyer. Tweeting, in public, that the fired ambassador was a train wreck while she’s testifying isn’t “intimidating a witness” under any stretch of the law, any more than slipping a “kick me” sign on her back while she’s entering the chamber would be witness tampering.
And let’s look at who actually, and directly, relayed this “intimidating threat” (scare quotes) to the witness. Why, that would be Adam Schiff. Even if you tried to portray Trump as some kind of mafia don, Schiff would be the mafia thug who delivers the threat.
I think the Democrats are playing to an audience of eight-year olds who don’t understand any of the legal terms being bandied about. For example, Nancy is claiming that Trump is guilty of bribery and today I was surprised to hear a pundit imply that the bribery was paid to Trump instead of by Trump. A competent prosecutor would at least have decided who was the briber and who was the bribee, but then this is a clown show, not a real hearing.
The bribery case is also of course lacking any evidence of a transfer of money, unlike the bank transfers from Burisma to Biden and Kerry via a bank in Latvia which is providing the records. I have no idea whether the Latvians have some beef with former Ukrainian officials, or whether they just don’t want to be tarred as some dark entity favored by corrupt politicians, but reporter John Solomon is getting copies of the money transfers. Those are what a court considers as actual evidence of criminal activity.Report