Any TV show can get tiring after a while. You can’t say Donald Trumps 2020 State of the Union totally tanked in the ratings biz — but ratings were hugely down from a year before. Almost 1/4 of the visitors from last year didn’t tune in. Variety reports:
President Trump’s State of the Union address is on course for a smaller viewership than in the previous three years of his presidency.
Across the four major broadcast networks, his speech on Tuesday drew 15.9 million viewers according to early estimates, a 21% fall from last year. CBS scored the largest audience for the SOTU with 4.6 million viewers, swiftly followed by NBC with 4.4 million. ABC and Fox were close together in third and fourth, with the former garnering 3.6 million viewers and the latter 3.4 million.
The cable news and other network numbers will be added as they come in later in the day, but so far it doesn’t bode well for this SOTU speech compared compared to previous years.
In 2019, 46.8 million viewers tuned in to watch Trump address a joint session of Congress across 12 networks that carried the speech. That represented a small 3% bump on his 2018 address, which drew around the 45.6 million
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.