Tuning Biden out

The Hill’s Joe Concha reports on the ratings for the CNN town hall with President Biden this past Thursday evening:

President Biden turned to CNN to perform a town hall on Thursday night, marking the second time the White House has chosen the network in the past three months in this kind of format.

And the ratings were horrific, even by Biden’s standards.

According to early numbers from Nielsen Media Research, the Biden town hall from Baltimore, which was moderated by Anderson Cooper, delivered just 1.2 million viewers from 8 p.m. ET to 9:30 p.m. In the younger demographic (25 to 54-year-olds) that advertisers covet most, the commander in chief commanded a paltry 271,000 viewers.

For context in the cable news race, an average of 2.83 million viewers watched Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (8 p.m.) and the first half of Sean Hannity (9 p.m.). That’s more than 1.6 million more viewers. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes (8 p.m.) and Rachel Maddow (9 p.m.) attracted an average of 1.39 million viewers in taking second place.

Concha has much more here.

In its glory days the Drudge Report used the term impacting to describe big stories. What we have here is something like flaming out, or so I would like to think.

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