Forget the theater. The pettiness. Or Vindman explaining that he just didn’t have the time to talk to his boss. The endless testimony about a phone call from people who never actually heard it. And the increasingly strained efforts to maintain the facade. The show has come apart.
It’s in the numbers.
The Nov. 15-17 survey found that 48 percent of voters support the inquiry and 45 percent oppose it, a net drop of 5 percentage points since a Nov. 8-10 poll.
The latest poll, which comes as the investigation enters its second week in the public spotlight, marked the lowest net support for the impeachment inquiry and the largest week-to-week shift in views on the matter since Morning Consult began tracking the issue in early October.
The numbers are supposed to be trending the other way. That they’re not, is due to some combination of fatigue and poor performance by the Dems.
The writing is on the wall as far as the networks, who jumped in to give the hearings endless coverage as if they were actually major events, are concerned.
CBS on Tuesday became the first big television network to hit the brakes on wall-to-wall coverage of the impeachment hearings.
The network ended their special report of the hearings around 12:20 p.m., amid Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s testimony — though coverage continued on it’s news app and digital platform, CBSN.
“Strange… CBS ended its special report at 12:20. ABC, NBC, PBS, all the cable news nets are continuing to show the Vindman/Williams hearing,” CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter noted.
“CBS says it’s streaming the rest of this session on the web, & will resume on broadcast at 3pm when the next witnesses start.”
Sensible. The numbers aren’t there. Neither is the content. The impeachment hearings are a show on the verge of cancellation. In the traditional television sense.
The ratings numbers have been great for FOX and MSNBC. Not so much for the rest of the gang whose viewers are less partisan and are wondering why their soaps have been replaced by the world’s most boring programming. Can’t one of them have an affair or an evil twin brother?
None of this is good news for the entire effort. And another reminder that Twitter isn’t America.
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