With what seems to be increased interest in political affairs lately, I was hoping to see television ratings up for the Dem convention this year. Early reports indicated the opposite — ratings were down for the major networks when compared to 2000.
But it turns out, the lesson isn’t that Americans were less interested in the convention; they were less interested in the networks that blew off the convention.
With ratings slipping for the broadcast networks as they scaled back their coverage, cable news more than doubled its viewership from 2000. CNN averaged 2.3 million viewers in prime time, up from 1.7 million four years ago. Fox finished second with 2.1 million (up from 400,000), followed by MSNBC with 1.3 million (up from 607,000). Meanwhile, Jim Lehrer’s coverage averaged 2.9 million viewers for PBS, 23 percent higher than four years ago.
Kerry, for his part, proved a big draw, attracting more than 24 million viewers for his acceptance speech, compared with 21.6 million for Gore at the last convention.
We can only hope they liked what they saw.