Obama vs. Reagan

Much has been made of the size of the TV audience for President Obama's inauguration.

Neilsen's best guess (and it IS a guess, there's little science involved in any ratings information) is that some 38 million viewers tuned in, second only to the 41.8 million who tuned in for Ronald Reagan's inauguration.

That may be.

But, I think we need to look at a couple of other numbers before we get too congratulatory.

There are about 115 million TV households in the United States today. in 1981, that number was a mere 82 million.

So, Reagan's TV audience share was around 51% of the available households, while Obama's audience share is only about 33%.

Let me be clear. I'm not saying this shows a significant difference in the importance of one event over the other.

What I'm saying is, as a nation we're relying on live TV less and less and less to get our news.