Tag: super bowl
Trump’s Super Bowl Ad Scores Last Place In Ratings

Trump’s Super Bowl Ad Scores Last Place In Ratings

Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign spent a reported $10 million for two 30-second ads during Sunday’s Super Bowl. According to USA Today’s Ad Meter, his criminal justice reform ad was the least liked spot among viewers of any ad from the game.

Trump’s ad featured Alice Johnson, a woman who was sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent drug offense but had her sentence commuted by Trump at the request of Kim Kardashian West. The ad appears to falsely imply that Johnson’s commutation was part of Trump’s criminal justice reform.

Former South Carolina state Rep. Bakari Sellers (D) described the ad as “offensive,” dubbing it the “I freed a Negro” ad.

Viewers apparently agreed; the Trump spot ranked 62nd out of 62 ads evaluated, with just a 3.33 average rating. His second spot, focused on the economy, was not included in the rankings.

The highest rated ad of the night, by contrast, came from Jeep during the game’s third quarter. The ad, “Groundhog Day,” featured actor Bill Murray, who starred in the film of the same name in 1993, and scored a 7.01 average rating.

USA Today has tracked public opinion on Super Bowl ads for 32 years. Panelists vote on each spot and any adult citizen may sign up to participate.

Trump has used his pardon and commutation power sparingly, often helping prominent Republicans including Dinesh D’Souza, Joe Arpaio, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Trump’s Super Bowl Interview With Hannity Is Fox Propaganda

Trump’s Super Bowl Interview With Hannity Is Fox Propaganda

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

President Donald Trump will give his first nationally televised interview with a broadcast network in seven months this Sunday when he appears on Fox Broadcasting Co. before the Super Bowl. While the prospect of the president facing detailed questions about the abuse of power scandal that triggered his impeachment by the House of Representatives should place him in political peril, no one at the White House will lose sleep over this weekend’s sit-down. That is because Trump will be interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity, a loyal sycophant with deep ties to his administration who has no interest whatsoever in trying to elicit damaging information from the president.

Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump have all sat for pregame interviews with the network hosting the Super Bowl (the game rotates between CBS, NBC, and Fox, the NFL’s three primary broadcast television rights holders). Because those interviews receive massive ratings, with a viewership generally between 10 to 20 million, they are showcases for each network’s talent. For NBC and CBS, that has meant calling on the star anchors of their morning, evening, and Sunday political talk shows to interview the president. Fox, on the other hand, traditionally gave the slot to conservative opinion host Bill O’Reilly, their “king of cable news.”

But this year’s Super Bowl offered Fox the opportunity to decide who would represent it in a new era, as Sunday marks the first time the network has hosted the Super Bowl since O’Reilly’s 2017 firing. If Fox executives had wanted to showcase their much-touted “news” side, they could have put forward someone like anchor Chris Wallace, who has occasionally made news for challenging interviews with Trump officials. Instead, they are sending Hannity, who is so sympathetic to Trump that he effectively functions as a White House spokesperson.

Fox’s message is clear: When the stakes are highest and the spotlight is brightest, the network produces right-wing propaganda, not journalism.

The last few years have seen Hannity evolve from a standard-issue GOP mouthpiece infamous for tossing softball questions to Republicans, to a powerful Trump administration insider. The Fox host defies traditional principles of journalism ethics by serving as a counselor to the president and others in his circle while simultaneously using his show to bolster the administration’s every move. Here’s a brief timeline:

2016: Amid a presidential campaign that saw Hannity actively using his show to boost Trump’s candidacy and promote unhinged conspiracy theories about his opponent, Hillary Clinton, Hannity endorsed Trump in a promotional video for his campaign, leading to a stern statement from Fox.

2017: Hannity triggered an advertiser exodus and internal dismay when he tried to defend Trump against reports linking his campaign to Russian interference in the 2016 election by championing the Seth Rich conspiracy theory

2018: Profiles in The Washington Post and New York magazine detailed the scope of Hannity’s White House influence and regular conversations with Trump. He was revealed as a secret client of Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, a fact the Fox host had not disclosed in his commentary on Cohen’s case. And he appeared on stage and spoke at a Trump political rally on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. 

2019: Hannity was a central figure in the Ukraine disinformation plot that triggered Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives.

2020: Documents uncovered by BuzzFeed News showed that Hannity had served as a backchannel between Trump and his associates under investigation during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

These are violations of basic ethical tenets that any other news outlet would not tolerate — indeed, the revelation that Hannity was a Cohen client and his appearance at the Trump rally alone would have been grounds for immediate termination elsewhere. At Fox News, by contrast, early efforts to check Hannity have been replaced by passivity and acquiescence as his close ties to Trump have apparently made him untouchable. And in allowing Hannity to represent the network and interview the president on the biggest possible stage, Fox executives are now all but shouting from the rooftops that they have no interest in reining him in.

Sunday’s result is a foregone conclusion. Hannity may have conducted more one-on-one interviews with Trump in recent years than anyone else on the planet. Trump spent more than 17 hours on Hannity’s Fox show during the 2016 Republican primary and gave the host an additional 14 sit-downs after taking office. But for all that access, Hannity’s interviews are most notable for their consistency. 

The pattern never varies: Hannity throws softballs, Trump responds with talking points, praise flows both ways, and the interview ends without any news being made. That’s what the audience will get on Sunday — not a shred of journalistic credibility, just the president’s leading booster and sometime personal adviser doing his best to make Trump look good.

That’s the presentation the network is willingly offering to the broader public. Fox executives could have dispatched a “news”-side anchor or reporter to try to do some journalism on Sunday. But they ultimately decided they’d rather send the president’s buddy to film an infomercial for his reelection campaign instead.

This would be an embarrassment for Fox if anyone there still had any capacity for embarrassment. But as we’ve seen, the network has long abandoned even the pretense that any rules apply to Hannity, its undisputed standard-bearer. He is the epitome of Fox’s news product, and so it is appropriate that he represent it to the world. 

Fox is Sean Hannity’s network, and it doesn’t care who knows it.

#EndorseThis: ‘Trump’ Destroys White House, Pushes The Button In Super Bowl Ad

#EndorseThis: ‘Trump’ Destroys White House, Pushes The Button In Super Bowl Ad

Suppose a copy writer is tasked with scripting a warm, G-rated commercial with a President Trump impersonator in it. How to proceed? Find a celebrity NFL quarterback (like Kirk Cousins) and let him joke around on camera. But between the lines, kick the real-life POTUS everywhere it hurts.

This D.C. area Super Bowl ad for gas-burning fireplaces looks warm-if-banal on the surface. But listen closely, and a slew of Trump’s blunders and missteps (and boorish personality traits) are referenced in the 90-second clip. His stubborn, irrational, dangerous love of coal. The ever-creepy “high approval ratings” delusion. “S***hole” remarks on immigration.

And yes, you called it…the “big, bigger” nuclear button on his desk. But the only actual WMD in this locally-broadcast ad is “President Trump” in all of his myopic arrogance and bluster.

Click to see the “button” get pushed.

Trump’s TV Star Fades: He’s No Longer A Ratings Magnet

Trump’s TV Star Fades: He’s No Longer A Ratings Magnet

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

President Donald Trump might have been cheering the New England Patriots’ historic comeback on Super Bowl Sunday, but he couldn’t have been happy about his own contribution to the day. His sit-down interview with Bill O’Reilly, which aired during Fox’s pre-Super Bowl coverage, turned out to be something of a ratings dud. And for a president who obsesses over TV ratings and uses them to validate his own identity, the Sunday interview seemed to be the latest example of his fading personal appeal.

Trump’s Q&A with O’Reilly drew approximately 12 million viewers. That’s a respectable number, but when President Barack Obama sat down for the traditional pre-Super Bowl interview in 2009, his first year in office, almost 22 million people tuned in, nearly double Trump’s audience. (And it wasn’t a matter of who was playing later; game viewership ratings in 2017 were substantially higher than those in 2009.) Even Obama’s pre-Super Bowl interviews during his second term in office easily outpaced the audience size for Trump’s recent sit-down. Obama drew 18 million viewers in 2014, 16 million in 2015, and 15 million last year.

That’s been the pattern in recent weeks, as Trump, who spent 2016 chronically boasting about his ability to spike TV news ratings, clearly falls short of the ratings successes Obama posted early in his presidency. As the least popular new president in modern American history, Trump seems to having trouble connecting with the masses.

For instance, on January 25, ABC News’ David Muir conducted the first prime-time interview with Trump following his inauguration. The show “didn’t set the Nielsen charts aflame,” drawing just 7.5 million viewers and weakly performing in the “advertiser-coveted” 18-49 demographic, as Varietyreported. How many viewers watched Obama’s first prime-time interview as president? Seventeen million, or 10 million more than tuned in for Trump.

At the end of last month, when Trump turned his announcement of a Supreme Court nominee into a prime-time production, 33 million people watched. In contrast, Obama’s first prime-time event was a press conference he held on the night of February 4, 2009, when nearly 50 million Americans watched.

And then there was the size of Trump’s inauguration audience, which became a topic that drove the White House to distraction. After bragging that his swearing-in would perhaps draw the largest crowd in Washington, D.C. history, only a modest-sized audience showed up, Trump began wildly inflating the estimates. The crowd “looked like a million, million and a half,” he announced at a speech the day after inauguration, while a crowd-science expert estimated that Trump’s audience was about one-third the size of Obama’s approximately 1.8 million-person crowd in 2009.

Then — after continuing to stew over crowd size numbers throughout the day — Trump sent White House press secretary Sean Spicer to the White House press briefing room to angrily tell reporters that Trump’s swearing-in attracted “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the world.”

Trump himself tweeted about how large his inauguration TV audience was, bragging that more people watched his swearing-in than Obama’s four years earlier.

But Trump’s citation of Obama’s second inaugural was a red herring; here are the facts: Across 12 television networks, 31 million people watched Trump’s inauguration, which was 7 million fewer than watched Obama’s first inauguration. That represented a nearly 20 percent decline in viewership. (Trump also garnered fewer viewers than both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.)

Some caveats: Trump’s Fox News interview with Sean Hannity last month was a big success. So we know that within the right-wing media bubble, Trump remains a star attraction.

And the topic of Trump is still driving viewers to television news teams. The 2016 election cycle delivered a ratings bonanza for cable news, with all three networks enjoying robust audience gains: Fox was up 36 percent in 2016 compared to 2015, CNN, 77 percent, and MSNBC, 87 percent. (MSNBC posted its best year ever, and CNN its best since 1995.) And their ratings remain strong in 2017.

Note also that as it rides a wave of Trump mockery, Saturday Night Liveis posting its best numbers in 22 years.

But the idea that Trump himself stands as some sort of cultural phenomenon and that Americans flock to their TVs every time he appears in front of a camera is simply not accurate. (Television news producers, please take note.)

In television-speak, viewer fatigue seems to have set in and the plot line already appears to be running thin. Keep in mind that Trump just made history by losing the popular vote tally by nearly 3 million votes and remains the least popular new president since modern-day polling was invented.

Trump’s tepid Nielsen numbers are bad news for the president since he’s utterly obsessed with television ratings. Even before entering politics, he routinely took to Twitter to tout the numbers for his show Celebrity Apprentice. (“For Trump, Everything Is a Rating,” noted a recentNew York Times headline.) For years, Trump has turned to ratings as a way to both validate himself and to undercut his foes.

And yes, Trump has openly lied about ratings when they didn’t convey the storyline he preferred — when they didn’t confirm his status as a winner.

From Adweek:

Former (and now deceased) Celebrity Apprentice publicist Jim Dowd told PBS’ Frontline in 2015 that even as the show’s ratings plummeted, Trump demanded he call the TV reporters at major publications and tell them, “‘No. 1 show on television, won its time slot,’ and I’m looking at the numbers and at that point, say Season 5, for example, we were No. 72.”‘

Last year, Dowd told CNN that in his 20 years in the television business, he’d never seen anyone “who cared as deeply about ratings, positive or negative, as Donald Trump.”

On the eve of the inauguration, Bill Scher, writing in New Republic, suggested there was no better way to rattle a man “uniquely obsessed with being seen” than to tune out his swearing-in and deprive him of a big TV audience to brag about. “A mass refusal to watch Trump on TV will deprive him of big ratings, which he routinely uses to create a false impression of widespread popularity.”

There hasn’t yet been a mass refusal to watch Trump in recent weeks, but the shoulder shrug does seem to be spreading.