Replies

Without Donald Trump Fox Loses Half The Debate Audience

Of course that doesn't stop the professional GOPe apologists and propagandists from the pontificating cocktail class from trying to spin the results.
Quickly to the typeset, clickety-click, Bill Kristol and the crew at the Weekly Standard do their earnest impression of Baghdad Bob by comparing the Fox News debate to the previous Fox Business debate.
A comparison of apples to pancakes.

It looks to me like they lost 12 million viewers since the first debate, and it would have been even worse if some people didn't just tune in to watch the train wreck in progress.

Some drop-off was expected because all the debates have experienced it, but the math shows that the drop-off here was significant, double the rate of the other networks ...

So, will our FRiend House Atreides simply man-up and admit an error, or was it really an intentional display of propaganda all along? The ball is in your court.

Look, I’ll do a very quick assessment of YOUR numbers in Post 93 above without trying to go verify their accuracy.

And I’ll use this calculator:

http://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?m1=08&d1=06&y1=2015&m2=1&d2=28&y2=2016

to determine elapsed days between debates on the same network.

1. FBN — For the 65 days between debates, viewers dropped 21.43% or .3296% PER DAY.

2. CNN — For the 90 days between debates, viewers dropped 21.74% or .2415% PER DAY.

3. FOX — For the 175 days between debates, viewers dropped 48.00% or .2742% PER DAY.

When adjusted for the number of ELAPSED DAYS between debates, the audience drop percentage PER ELAPSED DAY falls between the PER ELAPSED DAY percentage drop of Fox Business Channel and the drop of CNN.

Quite frankly, other than folks such as us who kinda OBSESS over this stuff, for the broader American populations, these debates become “same-old, same-old” and their interest in watching them drops off with time —as the above assessment shows when factoring in the variable of TIME.