Was Taylor Swift at the State of the Union speech and I just didn’t notice? We’ve probably already spent too much time dissecting Joe Biden’s rendition of “Angry Old Man Yells at Clouds,” but the reality is that there were a lot of people watching that speech. Viewership was up a whopping 18% as compared to last year’s SOTU, with more than 32 million people tuning in. That doesn’t necessarily translate to good news for Biden as we’ll discuss in a moment, but it was a welcome sign for the news networks. Viewership wasn’t evenly divided among the networks, however. Fox News ran away with the ratings victory, with their three primary outlets accounting for nearly 8 million viewers. Nobody else even came close.
Fox News Channel was America’s go-to network for President Biden’s third State of the Union address on Thursday, drawing more viewers than any other network.
A whopping 5.8 million average viewers turned to Fox News for Biden’s speech, between 9:26-10:33 p.m. ET, according to data from Nielsen Media Research. A stunning 1.14 million of those viewers were in the advertiser-coveted demographic of ages 25-54. Fox News’ telecast went up 24% among total viewers and 34% in the 25-54 demo since the 2023 State of the Union address.
Fox News Channel, FOX Business Network and FOX combined reached an average of 7.9 million viewers.
As you can see, Fox simply dominated the evening. ABC News did fairly well, placing second with 5.2 million viewers and NBC came in third with 4.5 million. CNN once again managed to come in dead last with a dismal 2.6 million. They even lost out to MSNBC. Viewership in the key demographic of people aged 25-54 spread out in a similar fashion. Fox was up 24% with 874,000 people watching. CNN managed 518,000.
But why were so many people watching? That’s not the sort of question that can be answered by looking at the Nielson ratings, but we can probably take some solid inferences from recent events. Rather than curiosity about Biden’s future plans or opinions about the current state of the nation, the lion’s share of the viewers watching Fox were probably wondering how long Biden could make it without having another cognitive failure and losing the thread. They were probably disappointed because Biden’s handlers clearly adjusted his schedule to allow him to stay up past his normal bedtime and they had him hyped up to risky levels with some sort of stimulant. (We’ll be charitable and just assume it was caffeine.)
On the other side of the aisle, there may indeed have been some Biden cheerleaders who were eager to hear him speak. But even among those on the left, the pro-Hamas wing of the party was likely waiting to see if their pressure campaign was having any effect and if Biden would announce some new anti-Israel policy. The President did break out his new plan for a floating dock or something to deliver aid to Gaza by sea, but if the “uncommitted” voters were hoping for a demand for a full and immediate ceasefire from “Genocide Joe,” they once again came away disappointed.
The other factor leading to the large audience that we shouldn’t ignore is the fact that we are now in a presidential election year. Many people who are not political junkies are starting to pay attention, so there would typically be some additional people watching as compared to the off-cycle years. But even taking that into account, an increase of nearly 20% is pretty massive. Judging by the President’s approval ratings, I would hazard a guess that well below half of those watching were there to show their support for Biden. This may wind up being a positive sign. An informed populace makes better decisions, are at least we can hope they will.
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