15 Comments

That is a heartbreaking story (I’m wanting to write that the man’s hidden sickness is as serious or worse than his wife’s… but good grief!!!)

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That day haunts me. It was a beautiful spring day. She was just a little kid. And the mom in the wheelchair - she looked at me, at the bags, it was obvious her kids knew me since they said hi to me using my name. If I had to guess, when they held the vote, she voted for food. It was 15 year ago, and I remember it like it happened today.

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Like it or not, that Inauguration is history in the making and may mark the last peaceful transfer of power for who knows how long. I prefer to watch some of the lowlights.

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Keep the faith, unc. I think they'll do enough things wrong that we'll get the House back in 2026, and potentially even the Senate, although I'm less certain of the latter.

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Our tv viewing doesn't matter- Neilson ratings are calculated from select viewers (30K+) who participate in their surveys and have devices attached to their tvs. There are also some participants who keep written diaries.

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Question -- so when they say that a million people watched something, like the moon landing or a superbowl game -- that's an extrapolation? Does Nielsen also do numbers from the non-cable/regular tv? Like YouTubeTV, Sling, Huku, etc? I had been under the (obviously mistaken belief) that there was more data than just Neilsen's that was forwarded over to Neilsen for their calculations?????

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I read the article, and it does point out that for streaming, they only look at TVs for streaming, not computers, tablets or phones -- so I question their numbers. Also the idea of taking such a minuscule percentage of the population and extrapolating it. But I accept that's what we've got!

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That's what political polls do, too. Sometimes their population sample is only 1K people.

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Don't get me started on political polls -- PLEASE -- I have spent a ton of time specifically detailing what's wrong with polling. The size of their polled universe is the least of their problems. SIGH!

But there IS actual data. As regards election data - starting this month, we've been able to see a lot of precinct level data broken out by party, gender, age, ethnicity - and that data will inform the pollsters as they create their 2026 secret sauce for data manipulation. But my point is that some of us look at actual data, and use that.

So - if Hulu says that X number of their viewers watched the inauguration and that comprised Y percent of total viewership from noon to 2, that's ACTUAL data. And they know precisely who watched because Hulu (and the others) know who each and every one of their viewers are. They're not the only one that does this -- AND they know whether people watched on TV, computer, iPad or phone.

Nielsen data has the same problem of data extrapolation as political polling -- they have secret sauce they use to normalize the data, and then turn it out based on their formulae of age, gender, geographic, ethnicity, etc.

I like real data.

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I'm sure there will be many polls pre/post event, but those aren't verifiable.

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I still think that for the streaming services, they KNOW EXACTLY who watched what.

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I'll be zooming with friends from all over the world at noon on Monday. News viewing has significantly decreased for me since Nov 6th and will stay this way for the next two years.

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I respect that you'll be zooming....but if you CAN tune your TV to some non-news outlet (like a shopping channel) all day -- that really helps the cause!

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Absolutely I will be doing that.

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