If you ask Trump, more people watched his interview with Tucker Carlson than the Superbowl, which is a big deal because nothing means more to Trump than “ratings.”
Alas, Fox News got very respectable ratings during the first GOP 2024 Primary debate.
Even without Trump present, the Republican debate outdid expectations. A crowded field of eight candidates, all polling far behind Trump, drew a solid 12.8 million viewers across Fox News and Fox Business.
That number is nowhere near the 2015 number when Trump insulted Megyn Kelly (“blood from somewhere”) and the MAGAS loved it. No, those days are over; too many cord-cutters, people watching on phones, etc.
Now, let’s talk Trump.
You may have read some of his posts on the hundreds of millions of views he got on Twitter. Mediaite has a nice summary:
“231,000,000 Views, and still counting,” Trump crowed on his social media platform Thursday. “The Biggest Video on Social Media, EVER, more than double the Super Bowl!”
Trump also promoted a piece from a right-wing blog claiming “Trump’s Tucker Interview The Most Watched Interview EVER, Beating Oprah & Michael Jackson.
Ew. I’m not sure which interview would make me sicker. At least Oprah is likable.
As per usual, on further investigation, the 231 million view number is utterly meaningless, and it’s almost impossible to determine the real number.
One of the first things Musk did when taking control of Twitter was to hide the “video view” metric, which counted the number of people who viewed a video on Twitter.
But even the video view metric was unreliable.
According to Twitter, if you watch a video for two seconds with only half the video player in view, you count as one video view.
And I’ll bet that in the article I wrote about the interview (Tucker asking about civil war), the fact that I re-checked the video four times probably counts as four views.
So, there are no really accurate metrics on whether Trump and Tucker actually reached the audience that they are claiming. My guess is that their number is wildly exaggerated.
I say this for one reason. Tucker Carlson is shockingly bloodthirsty when it comes to political violence. Throughout the interview, Carlson continued to ratchet up the violent rhetoric. Carlson said there would be violence just because Trump is charged.
Later, Carlson told Trump that if the left can’t get him through litigation, they’ll just have to kill him. Never mind that the left abhors political violence, and Trump wouldn’t be in his current situation were it not for political violence.
Finally, Carlson asked about whether civil war is in our future.
Trump appropriately told Carlson that he is the only one who asks about that and then said there is a lot of “passion” (MAGA fans “love him”) and a lot of “Hate.” He’s just talking about his MAGA base, and he said that not a good combination.
Tucker said that the left is going to kill Trump and that his MAGA supporters could start a civil war, which is a fairly news-worthy claim.
And yet, this interaction wasn’t even above the fold in The New York Times or Washington Post. It was also the last question asked, a point by which most viewers had likely left.
So one of the only things we know with certainty is that Fox News beat its own expectations — which could mean there is more interest in other candidates than people think. Plus, we also know that there’s no reliable way of counting views of Trump on Twitter, or “X”.
I’d pay to watch Oprah interview Trump and answer every question.
Tucker Carlson: “Do you think we’re moving towards civil war?”
Donald Trump: “You know, Jan. 6 was a very interesting day because they didn’t report it properly…People in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced.” pic.twitter.com/xMAPPvyI61
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) August 24, 2023
I can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com and on Twitter @JasonMiciak.
Editor’s note: This is an opinion column that solely reflects the opinions of the author.
The post RATINGS: Fox News has last laugh at Tucker Carlson after GOP debate ratings revealed appeared first on Occupy Democrats.
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