The Truth Is Out There Somewhere
January 23, 2025
I’m honestly doing my best to try and remain objective and indifferent as the second term of DJT unfolds. I realize that’s hardly an approach that’s winning me any brownie points with anyone, and it’s increasingly clear the Maginot lines are being drawn even starker and becoming more cemented between partisan sides. My roommate is now literally standing up and cheering at what he hears from Fearless Leader and now no longer wants to read my THE NEW YORK TIMES because “they don’t say nice things about him or Elon”. Such is life.
But in an attempt to reassure my equally passionate friends (at least I still think we are) on the other side of the aisle, please know I am acutely aware that my roommate’s champion is a volatile powderkeg who has rushed headlong into his comeback determined to do as he sees fit and will bite the head off of anyone or any entity that might offer up something that could be conceived as counter to his vision. Ask The Right Reverend Marian Edgar Budde, for one.
So I did take notice of the alarm that the astute Substacker extraordinaire Chris Cillizza sounded in his subscriber newsletter yesterday morning, a piece ominously headlined as follows:
A story guaranteed to piss Donald Trump off
Ratings!
Well, now you’re talking my language. And Cillizza certainly channeled the nervous zeitgeist of many when he rattled off these figures
:
The ratings are in for Donald Trump’s second inauguration! And they are, well, blah.
According to Nielsen, 24.59 million people tuned in to watch the 45th president be sworn in as the 47th president. That was way down from the 33.76 million who watched Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021 and even down from Trump’s 2017 inauguration when 30.64 million people tuned in.
Does this matter?
On one level, not at all. Trump is president for the next four year whether or not people watched him being sworn in! And, with the decline of linear TV — and the rise of YouTube, social media etc. — my guess is that ratings for live events like this will continue to fall. On another level, however, Trump is still sort of stuck in the mid 80s/early 90s when TV ratings were the coin of the realm — the way you distinguished what was popular and what wasn’t.
And low ratings will make him angry.
So even though he seemed distracted enough by, say, the thoughts of the Right Reverend, I shared Cillizza’s concern that we were on the verge of another toilet-infused rant on the accuracy of measurement and the bias of those who reported it. Especially since a simple Google search offered story after story on how the wishes of those who thought they could personally impact ratings came true. Most media accounts trumpeted the declines that Cillizza at least attempted to present with balance.
But I’m experienced enough with this world to have had a few alarms of my own go off that strongly suggested that this story was incomplete. So I set off on my own quest for context. I found a little bit of it with the handy bullet points supplied by THE ANKLER’s Sean McNulty in yesterday morning’s THE WAKEUP newsletter:
2025: 24.6M
17.4M were over 55.
10.7M were on FOX NEWS alone.
CNN was 1.8M, MSNBC was 880k.
That order was CNN (10M), MSNBC (6.5M) and FOX NEWS (2.7M) for Biden’s.
2021: 33.8M (Biden)
2017: 30.6M (Trump #1)
2013: 20.6M (Obama #2)
2009: 37.8M (Obama #1)
There’s several takeaways I gathered from that data:
— Second inaugurations of presidents decline from the first– indeed, the rate of decline between Barack I and Barack II was substantially greater (-45% vs. -27%) to what DJT saw.
— The 9.17M net decline of viewers seemed to be heavily driven by the -8.2M drop between ’21 and ’25 on CNN and the -5.62M decline on MSNBC (0ffset, of course, by the 8 million net gain for FOX NEWS).
— The reported linear TV audience in aggregate was more than 70% composed of folks in DJT (and my) demo. So where were all of these younger folks who watched his podcast apperances and actually got off their duffs to cast votes?
I had to dig real deep to find a source that was actually providing data points to answer those burning questions. Finally, after hours of searching I landed on Dmytro Murko’s recap from STREAMS CHARTS that dropped late Tuesday:
Millions of viewers tuned in live on Twitch, YouTube, and other streaming platforms to watch the inauguration. Streams Charts tracked which channels attracted the largest audiences during the event. Thanks to the inauguration, some popular streamers even set new personal viewership records.
Between 12:00 PM on January 20 and 4:00 AM on January 21 (GMT), thousands of streams dedicated to Trump’s inauguration aired on streaming platforms. The ceremony was also streamed on Donald Trump’s official channels on YouTube, Twitch, and Rumble. Both YouTube and Twitch set new peak viewership records during the broadcasts. Trump’s YouTube channel peaked at 704,798 viewers, the best among individual channels and the second best across all platforms during the inauguration. The president’s channels on Twitch and Rumble also drew large audiences, though they weren’t as popular.
(M)any other news channels and even popular streamers also hosted their own broadcasts. Among the media channels covering the event, the top performer was LiveNOW from FOX on YouTube, which peaked at 710,927 viewers, setting a new personal record. Other channels from big media in the top 10 included Associated Press, AlJazeera Arabic, and CNN
.
Thanks to the inauguration coverage, the News & Politics section on YouTube set new all-time viewership records. During the ceremony, peak viewership in the section hit 9,691,679, with 2,727 channels streaming at the peak. Both of these numbers became records for the category.
Now I don’t need to be reminded that these aren’t Nielsen panel numbers and they’re not necessarily even reflecting viewers from the United States. So the kneejerk reaction that the ~9.7M YT viewers more than offset those previously cited declines isn’t quite accurate. But it does underscore that an awful lot of people chose to watch a significant live event on some other source besides linear TV, and that live-plus-same day Nielsen numbers should not be seen as a definitive and final number. I knew that more than two decades ago when Nielsen began to provide measurement of time-shift viewing and a decade ago when significant multiplatform entities began becoming reportable. It’s far truer now, and it’s high time the simpletons in mainstream press figured that out.
And with spectacular timing, a couple of clearly non-political stories dropped yesterday that reinforced that fact. One came from the ENTERTAINMENT folks at FOX as regurgitated by POP CULTURE’s Megan Behnke:
Deadline reports that medical drama Doc is the network’s most-watched debut telecast in five years since the launch of 9-1-1: Lone Star in January 2020. Within its first 11 days, the premiere, which aired on Jan. 7, reached 15.6 million cross-platform viewers, with a 609% increase for the live + same-day audience of 2.2 million. Reportedly, the majority of the show’s audience comes from delayed linear viewing, but streaming was part of the 15.6 million total viewers in the extra four days after its first seven days.
What was first headlined as a bomb has, upon further review, been revealed to be a pretty decent performer. Pretty much just like what the streaming figures from Monday revealed.
And as for the technology and progress-challenged folks at Nielsen, yetserday they actually took a significant step toward being able to feed a more accurate narrative to those starving journos, as AXIOS’ Kerry Flynn gushed:
Nielsen has received accreditation for its Big Data + Panel national TV measurement from the Media Rating Council (MRC), certifying its ability to combine first-party viewership data with its panel.
The MRC, the media industry’s de-facto measurement watchdog, said this is the first accreditation for a hybrid panel and big data product.
The firm previously accredited Nielsen’s national TV ratings and integration of first-party streaming data. This move certifies the integration of big data and the combined methodology.
Nielsen said it will endorse this product as currency ahead of the 2025 Upfront season when TV networks pitch advertisers their upcoming programming slates.
Given the tenseness and fragility of the media and political landscapes, this news couldn’t have come at a more opportunistic time.
I’m certainly hoping that someone can link something like this to the sources that Fearless Leader doomscrolls while he’s crapping out Big Macs after his midnight FaceTimes with some established autocrat on the other side of the world. It’s also high time those that the mainstream press report on learned what the truths of media measurement are these days. It might save us all some anxious moments in the days ahead. So help me G-d.
Until next time…