Republican Convention Falls Short of TV Ratings Expectations

CLEVELAND — Television is Donald J. Trump’s comfort zone, the medium where he ruled as master of “The Apprentice,” lured record audiences to Republican primary debates, and deftly outmaneuvered opponents with his camera-ready skills.

For politicos and producers alike, the Republican National Convention here this week was widely anticipated as a ratings bonanza.

It did not live up to the hype.

About 32 million Americans watched Mr. Trump’s climactic acceptance speech on Thursday evening on the major cable news and broadcast channels, according to ratings from Nielsen, released on Friday.

Mr. Trump’s remarks, at an hour and 15 minutes the longest in modern convention history, just beat out those of the previous Republican nominee, the decidedly less unpredictable Mitt Romney, who was seen by about 1.9 million fewer viewers when he addressed the party’s convention four years ago. Viewership throughout the convention week was about the same as in 2012.

In the past four years, many Americans have turned to less traditional means to watch televised events, including YouTube, Facebook and livestreams widely available around the web.

But the 2016 race, with its unlikely cast of candidates and dramatic twists, had been attracting record audiences to cable news networks throughout the past year. The 19.8 million viewers who watched the Republican convention on Tuesday, across all the major news networks, was notably less than the 24 million who tuned in for the first Republican primary debate on Fox News last August.

In Cleveland, television producers grumbled about the less-than-optimal spectacle put on by the Trump campaign. Relatively unknown speakers appeared in the prime 10 p.m. hour, when the broadcast networks go live, while appealing figures like Senator Jodi Ernst of Iowa were bumped. Strange pauses in the action left anchors scrambling to fill time.

“The underwear model had a better speaking slot than Jodi Ernst,” said Stuart Stevens, the strategist who oversaw Mr. Romney’s convention in 2012, referring to Antonio Sabato Jr.

New York executives who flew here for the proceedings were perplexed. Watching delegates stream out of the Quicken Loans Arena one night at 10:30, just as viewership was peaking, one senior network figure asked a producer if the Republicans expected to fill the nation’s living rooms when they could not fill the seats in the hall.

After the death of Garry Marshall, the longtime TV producer and film director, was announced late Tuesday during convention coverage, several television executives joked that they ought to cut in with the news, given the sleepy proceedings onstage.

NBC was the highest-rated broadcast network on each of the convention’s four nights. But the overall winner was Fox News, which, despite the tumult involving its departing chairman, Roger Ailes, easily defeated its rivals. On Thursday night, Fox was watched by about 9.4 million viewers, its biggest convention audience in 20 years. Fox’s viewership for Mr. Trump’s speech was up about 30 percent from the convention’s first night, when the candidate’s wife, Melania Trump, spoke.

Mr. Trump is a keen student of television ratings: During a recent interview, he produced a sheaf of photocopied Nielsen charts for “The Apprentice” dating to the mid-2000s, and he often calls network executives to discuss the finer points of audience data.

At an appearance here on Friday morning, Mr. Trump described his ratings this week as “through the roof,” and he wrote on Twitter that the convention was “one of the best produced, including the incredible stage & set, in the history of conventions.”

“Big T.V. ratings!” Mr. Trump added.

That was before the actual Nielsen figures were released. Asked on Friday evening if Mr. Trump wished to comment further, a spokeswoman said the campaign was deferring to Mr. Trump’s earlier remarks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/rnc-ratings-trump.html