360DigitalInfluence

I’ll have more to say later, but the overnight ratings for last night’s ABC “Primetime” town hall meeting on health care featuring President Barack Obama were not good lousy.  According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show finished at the bottom of the ratings last night (at the very bottom according to Variety).

I cannot judge how effective the special was, in that, like apparently the vast majority of Americans, I found something better to watch last night during the time slot.  I also chose sleep over the follow-up on “Nightline.”

But, I do know that the program didn’t get low ratings because ABC slipped it on with little warning.  The network promoted the special heavily — including an interview with the President on “Good Morning America.”  It was helped in the promotion by the Republican National Committee, who after being rebuffed in buying ads on the show (ABC as a network does not accept advocacy ads so they were not treating the RNC any different than other political group) charged that the program would be an infomerical for the administration’s health care plan.  The RNC also went after a member of the Obama administration — Linda Douglass — who used to work at ABC and the participation of ABC’s Dr. Timothy Johnson, who they tried to portray as a longtime advocate of universal, government run health care.  Those charges were picked up in the political media and the media about the media and the complaints were echoed regularly on Fox News.

So was the Republican campaign successful in deterring Americans from watching or was there something else involved?  My guess is the latter.

The timing certainly didn’t help.  But, there is one other factor there that I think needs to be taken into account.  If you look at the ratings for presidential news conferences and appearance of the president and the vice president on various news shows, you will see they have been on a downward path since the inauguration.

Could it simply be that America’s fascination with politics (as seen by the higher ratings during the presidential campaign through the inauguration) has ended and we are back the same level of blah that we were in as recently as two years ago?