A Jump in C-Span’s Ratings Amid the Government Shutdown

Given the meager approval ratings the public has consistently given Congress, it might seem surprising that anyone watches the unblinking live shots of the Senate and House on television. But government crises apparently have a way of ratcheting up interest in Washington procedural drama.

C-Span does not receive ratings from the industry standard-bearer, Nielsen, so Capitol Hill press secretaries and callers to “Washington Journal” have had to guess about how many people watch the suite of noncommercial channels. But C-Span, which televises the House, and C-Span2 have a small, dedicated following, according to Rentrak, a Nielsen competitor.

Rentrak’s nationwide audience projections are based on anonymous data from set-top boxes in about 12 million homes served by companies like DirecTV, Dish Network and Charter. A 1.0 rating is approximately 1.15 million households, and C-Span’s average daily rating in September was 0.017, meaning 19,550 households were watching at any given time. C-Span2’s average was 0.012, or 13,000 households. Those averages are undeniably low. But Bruce Goerlich, Rentrak’s chief research officer, observed that the ratings “popped up” toward the end of the month as a government shutdown loomed. And since C-Span is a utility of sorts, its real relevance is measured in its cumulative ratings: the number of households that watch at one time or another. In September, nearly 9 million households tuned in to C-Span at least once, according to Rentrak’s projections, and about 5.3 million households tuned into C-Span2. Unlike most channels, however, C-Span professes not to care about ratings.