Posted in: CBS, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: Kennedy Center, opinion, trump

Kennedy Center/Trump Ratings: White House Now Doing Damage Control

Despite Trump bragging the he would bring in epic ratings for the CBS broadcast, his Kennedy Center is now attempting to do damage control.

"I believe — and I'm gonna make a prediction — this will be the highest-rated show that they've ever done, and they've gotten some pretty good ratings, but there's nothing like what's gonna happen tomorrow night," Donald Trump shared back in December, a day before he hosted this year's Kennedy Center Honors. "We never had a president hosting the awards before. This is a first. I'm sure they'll give me great reviews, right? You know, they'll say, 'He was horrible. He was terrible. It was a horrible situation.' No, we'll do fine. I've watched some of the people that host. Jimmy Kimmel was horrible, and some of these people, if I can't beat out Jimmy Kimmel in terms of talent, then I don't think I should be president."

Based on the Nielsen Live + Same Day numbers that were released, it looks like we can expect a Trump resignation speech pretty soon. Despite (or because of) a lineup of honorees that included Sylvester Stallone, Michael Crawford, KISS, George Strait, and Gloria Gaynor, the Trump-hosted awards broadcast scored the lowest ratings in the annual event's television history. The December 23rd CBS broadcast averaged 3.01 million viewers; that would be a drop of 4.1M Live+Same Day viewers compared to 2024's Queen Latifah-hosted effort.

Well, guess what? Despite knowing well ahead of time when the show was set to air and what they would be going up against, Trump's folks are pretending that the boastful promises he made didn't exist and have decided the move the goalposts on success. "Comparing this year's broadcast ratings to prior years is a classic apples-to-oranges comparison and evidence of far-left bias. The program performed extremely well across key demographics and platforms, despite industry and timing disadvantages, including a Tuesday air date two days before Christmas," shared Roma Daravi, VP of public relations for the Kennedy Center.

Once again, the person who brought up doing comparisons was Trump, and that's because he's got some weird obsession with Jimmy Kimmel – unless Daravi thinks Trump is far-left? "With overall television usage down roughly 20 percent year over year, the broadcast still tied for the #1 spot among adults aged 25–54, alongside a live NBA doubleheader," Daravi continued. "And on social media, Honors garnered 1.5 billion impressions in just one night — up from only 50 million similar impressions last year. This was a successful night celebrating the outstanding achievements of our Honorees at the Trump Kennedy Center."

Regarding those social media numbers, it would be interesting to see how they were able to differentiate between positive and negative impressions, as well as how they were able to weed out bots for more realistic reads. Because we're positive that they did that… right? Hello? Is this thing on?

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