#uspol #townhall #ratings #CNN
I've read quite a bit on here about how CNN's viewership fell as of the Trump Town Hall event, and today I've heard that the Reuters/Ipsos poll showing Biden in a strong lead as of today. So before y'all continue to be smug about the Town Hall being a bad broadcast choice by CNN, here are a few curve balls to throw at you:

Number of people who favor Biden over Trump likely increased because of the Town Hall, and they watched it.

Viewership of basic cable has been falling because it is, well, cable. But there's another curve ball coming from government regulators impacting how low-end cable service providers provide CNN, and that's in the form of a gov't program for cell phone service when it's also provided by a cable service provider.

I present as Exhibit A the cable provider Optimum. It has the right to superimpose its own ads (these days, additional PSAs) over ads run by CNN and it's been doing that ad nauseum over CNN and multiple other channels it has this right over, and that alone is enough to drop viewership of CNN and every other channel it's doing this on.

Optimum doesn't pull this shit on CSPAN channels nor on MSNBC, but pretty much all the rest of them....and its service contract is now up for renewal in Enid OK.

So when you look at raw viewership numbers for a basic cable channel, keep in mind that it's not just the channel's content that triggers the choice to switch channels.