Instead of participating in the first 2024 Republican Presidential debate on Fox News, former President Donald Trump instead sat down with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for an interview published to X, formerly Twitter. The interview has garnered more than 200 million views on the social media platform, but radio host Clay Travis believes accuracy is important in explaining television ratings and social media views.
After the debate Wednesday evening, Travis took to social media to argue that during the 2020 election, President Joe Biden was the least popular candidate on social media during debates and still won.
“Pay less attention to what Twitter likes,” argued Travis. “It often doesn’t overlap at all with huge majority of viewers who aren’t on here.”
When a user then told Travis that Trump’s interview with Carlson had garnered more than 75 million views in an hour as proof that the game has changed since 2020, Travis rebutted that the two comparisons aren’t comparable.
“These numbers aren’t the same at all. A TV audience is counted every six minutes for an average over two hours,” Clay Travis wrote in a post to X. “Not a total audience number. This is a total number of people who saw this video at all for a few seconds. It’s still impressive, but most people watched under a minute.”
A preliminary rating for the debate broadcast on Fox News hasn’t been released.
