Only 29 Percent Of American Idol Viewers Stayed Tuned For SOTU

“I hear that here at FNC, the execs were over the moon that American Idol was the SOTU lead-in on Fox broadcast,” a tipster told TVNewser yesterday. The auditions did boost Fox, but most of the 8 p.m. viewers didn’t stay on board for Bush. Lisa de Moraes reports:

“Though Bush clocked his biggest numbers on the Fox broadcast network, that’s not to say he did such a hot job retaining the Idol audience. In its final half-hour, Tuesday’s episode — set in Las Vegas and featuring auditions of the above-mentioned Idol wannabes — the singing competition logged 33 million viewers.

In his first half-hour of speechifying, Bush averaged about 9.5 million viewers on Fox. That’s a lousy 29 percent retention rate, which would get him canceled faster than he could say Emily’s Reasons Why Not if he were a TV series.

But, thankfully, he’s not. And, by 9:30 p.m., which is how long it took another 3 million Fox viewers to realize the president wasn’t just another bad audition for American Idol, that network’s contribution to the SOTU audience had plunged to 6.9 million viewers.”