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"Honey Boo Boo" Tops Republican National Convention

This is just sad, even though the reality isn't quite this bad -- the article notes that "Honey Boo Boo" topped the combined ratings of convention coverage on all other cable channels combined. Presumably, if you add in the coverage on broadcast networks, the combined ratings of the broadcast and cable coverage of the RNC did manage to beat TLC's reality trash.

So, does anyone remember when TLC stood for "The Learning Channel" instead of this sort of mindless reality trash? I'm definitely not a Republican, but I think I'd even take Clint Eastwood's skit over "Honey Boo Boo".
 
The RNC was going to be basically peaceable people getting along, and after the hour's over, you can watch the clips anywhere. Really we've heard almost all the clips over the past couple years by now anyway.
Honey Boo Boo was going to be a train wreck. Do they even show episodes on the net for that?

It's not really just the content of the shows that go head-to-head these days. Usually there are a lot of other factors. No two shows (well not as many as used to could be) can be compared as "apples vs. apples" anymore.
 
There were two bad things about the TV ratings for the Republican Convention.

(1) Extremely low ratings among adults 25-54. Only 34% of total viewers during Gov. Romney's acceptance speech were in the demo. (note: ratings data excludes C-SPAN and PBS coverage of convention)
(2) Fairly low ratings for all networks except FOX News. FOX News outrated any single other network by at least 2:1 (here, ABC came in #2).

I will be interested to see if the Democratic Convention this week follows the same two trends -- my bet is that it will.

In some ways, the convention TV coverage is worthless if the only viewers are already voters for your party.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
In some ways, the convention TV coverage is worthless if the only viewers are already voters for your party.
Click to expand...

That is an interesting thought. It would be interesting to see some kind of study that tells us what percentage of the viewers were the "party faithful, already committed to vote Republican" and what percentage were undecided and how many were already committed to vote for the other party.

But.... if everyone in the TV audience was already intending to vote Republican, was the broadcast worthless? If the broadcast built and re-enforced loyalty that will keep them loyal during the next election cycle, then the convention and the broadcasts were productive for the party.

The task at hand for the party is not just the election in November 2012, but to also position the party for future election cycles.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
There were two bad things about the TV ratings for the Republican Convention.

(1) Extremely low ratings among adults 25-54. Only 34% of total viewers during Gov. Romney's acceptance speech were in the demo. (note: ratings data excludes C-SPAN and PBS coverage of convention)
(2) Fairly low ratings for all networks except FOX News. FOX News outrated any single other network by at least 2:1 (here, ABC came in #2).

I will be interested to see if the Democratic Convention this week follows the same two trends -- my bet is that it will.

In some ways, the convention TV coverage is worthless if the only viewers are already voters for your party.
Click to expand...

Keep in mind those are just samples, and the pollsters doing the ratings survey call only land lines.
How many people in the United States own land lines?

I watched the convention off C-SPAN, do they subscribe to Nielsen?

I was wondering how did Current TV rank on this?
 
I'm a Democrat and I am betting that my convention will have the same low ratings....it's not politics, it is a massive viewer YAWN in a 200+ channel universe
 
People definitely are more interested in other things now, besides politics. You can tell that from voter turnout most years, and that's the one-day culmination of politics.
If you measure it every step along the way and compare it to 'ye olden days' when there weren't 200-channels and 200-things fracturing the audience, then 'ye olden days' is always going to be losing in favor, because really, it is.
 
It used to bother me in the days when the convention was all that was on. Now I can avoid it entirely. But I feel the need to see it.

The big reason for watching the Democratic convention is that it's near where I live. But the only way I would really benefit is to watch the local news and see how it is covered.

I've seen enough to say, "Who else you got?"
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
There were two bad things about the TV ratings for the Republican Convention.

(1) Extremely low ratings among adults 25-54. Only 34% of total viewers during Gov. Romney's acceptance speech were in the demo. (note: ratings data excludes C-SPAN and PBS coverage of convention)
(2) Fairly low ratings for all networks except FOX News. FOX News outrated any single other network by at least 2:1 (here, ABC came in #2).

I will be interested to see if the Democratic Convention this week follows the same two trends -- my bet is that it will.
Click to expand...

(1) From the viewpoints of the networks, those demographics are bad news. But from the viewpoint of the political parties, all those 55+ viewers are gold, since those are the people who are most likely to vote. So I guess it depends on your perspective.

(2) Definitely not the case for the Democratic convention. For the first night, the audience was fairly evenly distributed between four broadcast networks and several cable networks. Fox News had the lowest audience, however. Partisans watch the convention coverage, and while Republican partisans want to see the coverage of their convention by Fox News, the Democratic audience very evidently does not feel the same way. Not a surprise, because I think the same thing happened four years ago.
 
I'm a Democrat and I think like the Democrats do.

Hopwever, I watched network coverage of the Republicans the first night and all three hours on PBS the other two nights and I was convinced my party didn't have a leg to stand on. The only thing they could do, I concluded, was criticize the Republicans.

I watched PBS coverage all thee nights of the Democrats and don't know what was so great about the Republicans. I can't see the Republicans doing anything other than criticizing the Democrats.

One thing I did not hear from the Democrats (I only watched speeches and not commentary) was how they intend to deal with $1 trillion deficits and a $15 trillion debt.

And this morning, though that is radio and this is the TV board, Mike Huckabee said as part of his three-minute commentary that Clinton's speech made no sense because Clinton did things right and got results, while Obama continues to do the same thing that didn't work, which is called insanity. That didn't even take the entire three minutes. I watched hours and hours of coverage of the Democrats. And yet my vote this November may have been swayed by this one fact.

Never mind that I don't want the needy to be left out while the rich get all the benefits. Oh, one more detail from Huckabee. If the rich get their taxes raised they'll go on fewer vacations--fewer jobs for maids!
 
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