Trump's Prime-Time Debut Loses to Obama's in Ratings

Donald Trump showed this week that he still wants to lure TV audiences by scheduling a prime-time announcement for his pick for the next Supreme Court Justice. The announcement, which took over all major TV networks, had plenty of viewers, but it wasn't the ratings homerun that Trump was no doubt hoping for.

Trump organized the announcement like a reality show a la Celebrity Apprentice, flying in finalists for the post to Washington, and teasing that he, even if he'd already made his decision, he could change his mind at any time. The unusual prime-time scheduling of the event seemed designed to turn the announcement into a suspenseful must-see program.

Across eight different broadcast and cable networks, the announcement drew 33 million viewers. That made it the most-watched program of the night, but that's not difficult to achieve when the program pre-empts most other programming on the major networks. To stay clear of the event, most broadcast networks scheduled reruns of their usual programming.

The ratings for President Trump's prime-time debut fell well short of that of President Obama, who attracted nearly 50 million viewers with his first prime-time press conference in 2009.

Trump's announcement had its biggest single audience on CBS, where it was seen by 8 million viewers. That's about half the typical audience for NCIS, the program that the announcement pre-empted, making it seem likely that half of NCIS's audience simply neglected to change the channel after they realized that the show they really wanted to watch wasn't on.