Hullabaloo

Friday, September 07, 2012

 
I know you're Honey Boo Boo, but what am I?

by digby

I don't know why I'm bothering, but this story isn't complete:

Fox, in their haste to make President Clinton look less influential than a former Toddlers and Tiaras contestant, got the story completely wrong. In fact, Clinton's convention speech drew 25.1 million viewers across the seven networks that carried his speech. By contrast, Honey Boo Boo drew 2.4 million viewers. Only if you compare Honey Boo Boo's ratings with Clinton's ratings among the 18-49 demographic on one cable news network, CNN, did the two tie each other.

The total numbers for the evening as provided by Nielsen showed that not only did total coverage on all networks for Clinton far surpass the ratings for Honey Boo Boo as well as the ratings for Paul Ryan's speech from the same night of the week during the Republican National Convention, they also beat the ratings for the second half of the opening game in the NFL regular season.

Now, the reason they're doing this --- aside from the fact that everyone wants to say the words "Honey Boo Boo" -- is because last week a bunch of people went around saying exactly the same thing about the Republican convention.


Now, those articles all make clear that it's in the 18-49 demographic while Fox elides that entirely, but the headlines don't.

So, we have people who read the Huffington Post believing that Honey Boo Boo beat out the RNC and people who watch Fox believe that Honey Boo Boo beat out the DNC. And this is partly why people believe we live in alternate realities half the time.

The obvious fact is that way more humans watched both conventions than watched Honey Boo Boo in that time slot. The bigger question is why would anyone would believe otherwise? It makes no sense.

And I say this as someone who has watched Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and kind of enjoyed it. They all seem to be laughing at the audience as much as the audience is laughing at them. Which is more than I can say about the political networks.


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digby 9/07/2012 12:30:00 PM