Aside From Political Junkies, Who Is Watching?

Yes, I have the SOTU streaming while I type this (“Now it’s our turn….”) but Newsweek points out that I am part of a shrinking minority in America:

It’s a peculiarity of the modern State of the Union. What used to be a must-see for the country is watched by a shrinking audience. The only way to get people to tune to it, it seems, is a fresh face, a juicy scandal, or a war. Let’s look at the viewership for every SOTU going back to the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term. The most-watched of all was Clinton’s 1993 address, which wasn’t technically a SOTU (the first speech of a president’s term, typically given less than a month after his inauguration, is officially an “Address to the Joint Session of Congress”). That clocked in with a Nielsen rating of 44.3, meaning that about one in four households with televisions was watching….

….“They’re not defining moments for presidents,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. “There are a few times when the way events unfold later make something a president said memorable. I’m not sure you can know it when you see it.”

(Obama already unloaded his “Sputnik Moment” line, BTW). So, is a lot of this obsessing over the SOTU by the punditry wasted?

Probably.

But it does give us something to go on and on about, doesn’t it? And the media, already pre-fawning about how wonderful Obama’s address has been/will be, will place this address on a pedestal and will promote its worship as the best SOTU, evah!

So I listen, if only to puncture the false factoids of the slobbering media.