Republican Convention Viewership Dwarfs DNC Viewership in First Available Metric
The first measure of the Republican Party’s connection with voters was an emphatic, upbeat affirmation that America wanted to hear what the GOP had to say as the Republican National Convention kicked off Monday.
C-SPAN’s livestream of the first night of the convention drew 440,000 views, according to The Hill.
That amounted to more than five times the 76,000 views racked up by the Democratic National Convention last week during its opening night.
Nielsen Media Research figures that will begin emerging later Tuesday will give a fuller picture of the convention’s viewership.
Last week, 24.6 million people watched Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s Thursday night acceptance speech, according to AdWeek. That was well below the 27.8 million people who watched Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech in 2016, according to Variety.
In 2016, Donald Trump attracted 34.9 million viewers for his acceptance speech.
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt dubbed the Democratic National Convention “unwatchable.”
“The Democratic Convention’s first night no doubt had the loyalists tune in and leave the box on, but the traditional conventions draw their miserable ratings for the funny hats the Texas delegates wear, for the crazies outside the hall and for the panel discussions broadcasting from bars and coffee shops,” Hewitt wrote in a Washington Post column. “Rarely do the networks actually cover the speeches, and even when they do, they cut away frequently to other things. It’s the energy of the real conventions that made them at all watchable. That’s all gone now.”
In its review of the first night of the GOP convention on TV, ABC News noted that MSNBC was not content to simply report the event but “broke into a speech by the Missouri couple who stood outside of their house with guns when a Black Lives Matter protest march went by, after noting on an onscreen chyron that they had been charged with unlawful use of a weapon.”
“We do feel a responsibility to make sure that we are not unquestionably presenting things that are false, that are deliberately false and are potentially dangerously false,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said.
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham had a response to that.
“MSNBC is fact-checking the GOP speakers in real time,” Ingraham wrote on Twitter. “Why didn’t they do the same last week for the DNC?”
MSNBC is fact-checking the GOP speakers in real time. Why didn’t they do same last week for the DNC?
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) August 25, 2020
Former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said during her convention speech Monday that America does not need the vision of the current Democratic Party.
“Their vision for America is socialism, and we know that socialism has failed everywhere,” she said in her speech, according to Fox News. “Joe Biden and the socialist left would be a disaster for our economy. But President Trump is leading a new era of opportunity.”
On Tuesday, Haley was interviewed on “Fox & Friends” about Biden.
“Joe Biden is a very good guy. I know him, I mean he’s just as nice as they come,” she said. “But that’s just the problem.”
“We saw what happens when you try and be nice at the United Nations. Basically everybody was running over America when Obama and Biden were in there.”
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