OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
While a majority of Americans who watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address Tuesday evening had an overall positive reaction, it wasn’t all good news.
According to CNN, Biden’s “very positive” reaction rating was the lowest it’s been for a president in more than two decades.
“A 71% majority of Americans who watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address had a positive reaction to the speech, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, with a more modest 41% reacting very positively,” the network reported Wednesday morning.
“That’s a less enthusiastic reception than Biden received for his joint address to Congress last April when 78% had a positive reaction and 51% reacted very positively. Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama also saw higher enthusiasm for their speeches during their second years in office: 48% of those who tuned in for Trump’s 2018 State of the Union were very positive, as were an identical 48% of those who watched Obama’s 2010 address. Biden’s 41% on that metric matches the previous low in CNN’s speech reaction polls dating back to 1998,” CNN added.
The network went on to add that the higher ratings Biden received were most likely due to a higher percentage of Democratic voters watching.
“Good marks are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, as such speeches tend to attract generally friendly audiences. That’s true this year as well: The pool of people who watched Biden speak was about 11 percentage points more Democratic than the general public,” CNN said, adding some more details:
State of the Union addresses rarely have a major, lasting impact on presidents’ approval numbers, but there are signs that Tuesday’s speech buoyed viewers’ opinions of Biden. Those who watched the speech say that Biden’s policy proposals would move the country in the right direction (67%) rather than the wrong direction (33%). In a survey conducted before the speech, those same people were closer to evenly split (52% right direction, 48% wrong direction).
Meanwhile, some observers believe that other networks put a better spin on Biden’s address than it deserved, including Sister Toldjah at Red State, who pointed to CBS News:
On any given day, one can spot numerous instances of the mainstream media dutifully carrying President Biden’s water, but in a critical midterm election year where the writing is on the wall for Democrats and their “priorities” are on the line, the water carrying can go from merely being obscene to disturbingly grotesque.
Such was the case with the cast and crew at CBS News, who in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s very deceitful Tuesday State of the Union address polled viewers to find out what they thought of his speech. The results of the poll were revealed in a tweet and news piece in such a way so as to give readers a very misleading representation of how it was viewed.
The headline of the story is, “Most speech watchers say State of the Union made them feel optimistic, proud – CBS News poll.” But if readers simply scan the headline and don’t delve into the article itself, it would be easy to conclude, “‘Wow, that’s not bad considering his approval ratings are tanking’ — which is exactly what CBS News wants you to thinks,” she wrote.
A tweet promoting the story was even more positive: “Most Americans who watched President Biden’s first State of the Union address approved of what they heard, and many said it made them feel optimistic and proud.”
Most Americans who watched President Biden's first State of the Union address approved of what they heard, and many said it made them feel optimistic and proud. https://t.co/5J32ZGrwTc
— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 2, 2022
“The big problem with CBS News’s framing of their post-SOTU poll, as originally pointed out by RedState senior editor Joe Cunningham, is that nearly 50% of those polled were Democrats, which they don’t note until midway through the article – and as readers can see above it’s not reflected at all in the tweet,” Sister Toldjah noted further.
Might have been helpful to include party identification info in your tweet, @CBSNews. pic.twitter.com/rQ79bBeAZQ
— Sister Toldjah 😁 (@sistertoldjah) March 2, 2022
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