President Barack Obama’s Wednesday news conference on health care reform drew only about half as many viewers as his first news conference back in February. In fact, each news conference he’s had as President has drawn fewer viewers than the one before.
As the President pressed his case for congressional support of health care reform, the tally from The Nielsen Company showed that his audience was down by 4.1 million from his previous press conference in April, marking his 100th day in office.
President Obama held his fourth prime time press conference on Wednesday, July 22. It was carried live from 8:00 pm ET to approximately 9:00 pm on 11 networks. The sum of average audience for those networks was 24,682,519 viewers and had a combined household rating of 16.3. The networks carrying the press conference were ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision (delayed in Spanish), Telemundo (delayed in Spanish), BBC-A, BET, CNBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, and MSNBC.
Nielsen noted that viewing to Wednesday’s press conference was down 14% from the President’s April 29 press conference and down 50% from his first primetime conference on February 9.
