Even with most of the media promoting their case against President Trump, Democrats still failed to make impeachment the top story in 2020, as Americans tuned in more to actor Jussie Smollett’s alleged hate crime hoax and the death of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The polling firm Morning Consult found that 51% “saw, read, or heard a lot” about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s greenlighting of impeachment.
By comparison, 53% tuned in to former Empire actor Smollett’s claim that Trump backers attacked him, and 58% followed the death of Epstein in his jail cell.
And those weren’t even the stories with the “biggest reach” during a year where the national press corps focused much of its time on impeachment and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and report on Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
According to the analysis, “69% of registered voters said they’d heard ‘a lot’ about Hurricane Dorian, and 65% said the same of Trump’s invocation of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
The survey broke down how Democrats and Republicans viewed stories and found that they were divided on the usual political lines but agreed somewhat on nonpolitical news.
“The news with the biggest reach tended to find Democrats and Republicans in roughly equal fashion. Hurricane Dorian topped the list for both parties, as did the college admission scandal, dubbed ‘Operation Varsity Blues,’ involving Hollywood actresses, business leaders and other wealthy parents; deadly mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio; and Georgia and Alabama’s controversial moves to restrict abortion,” according to the survey analysis.
And despite the media’s co-hosting of the 2020 Democratic presidential debates, they were a viewership dud. “The Democratic debates were of little interest to most voters, and Republicans largely tuned out of the primary, unless there was bad news for a Democrat,” Morning Consult said.
