Tank Trump's Ratings
Concentrated Disinterest — A Citizen's Resistance Project
41.8 million television viewers watched Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, marking a high point in television viewership of this event. In 2008, Barrack Obama’s inauguration came close to the mark, with 37.8 million people tuning in.
These numbers show the high percentage of people who supported these Presidents from day one. With the fact that more people cast votes for Hillary Clinton, rather than President-Elect Donald Trump, the public can do one more thing to show him that we do not support him. We can tune this inauguration out. Some people have suggested that we just leave our televisions off, and that can work, but we can be more effective by concentrating our televisions on one or two channels that are not broadcasting the inauguration.
Here's how this works. Every cable and satellite TV provider can count the number of sets operating on their systems at any given minute. If you don’t have cable, satellite TV, or some other television provider that can count your TV’s on/off status, feel free to leave your TV off all day. However, if you have television service through Dish, DirecTV, Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Cox, Frontier, or one of a hundred other cable providers in the US, they can and will count and report their inauguration viewership like they did in 2013.
The thing is, if everyone’s tuned to a different channel, the inauguration will still have the highest ratings in the time slot. However, if everyone who is tuning out the inauguration tunes in to the same show, that show’s ratings will rival, and may surpass, the inauguration. That’s concentrated disinterest and it’s what we want.
Because The Discovery Channel is available on most basic cable packages, that’s the channel we’ve chosen for this project. If you don’t have Discovery, tune in Animal Planet or TV Land which are also available on basic cable.
If you have two or more TVs in the house, turn every single one to this channel. If you have kids in the house, or simply don’t want to be subjected to Naked & Afraid, turn the sound off and drape the TV with black cloth, or mourning bunting, which somehow seems appropriate this year. (Just make sure the back of the TV gets air so you don’t fry the components.)
If you absolutely can’t stand being in a news vaccum, consider listening on NPR. You could also tune in C-SPAN OR C-SPAN2 so you’re getting the direct, unvarnished events. Watching C-SPAN sends the message that we, the people, are directly watching our government rather than accepting third-party spin.
Force a Downward Trend Online
The President’s name is usually front and center on Inauguration Day, but we can keep it low on the “trending now” stats across the country by systematically Googling someone other than the President-Elect from 8:00am to 5:00pm Eastern.
Here’s a suggested list with Google search links:
(Click here for the same list with Bing search links)