Kennedy Center Honors hosted by Trump tanks in ratings with 35% fewer viewers than last year: report; The Independent, December 25, 2025

 Rhian Lubin, The Independent; Kennedy Center Honors hosted by Trump tanks in ratings with 35% fewer viewers than last year: report 

"President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center Honors show saw ratings for the annual event tank with 35 percent fewer viewers than last year, according to a report.

Trump became the first president to host the awards that aired Tuesday night after he boasted that the venue’s board and “just about everybody else in America” had requested he take center stage.

But according to preliminary Nielsen data, the televised awards show on CBS “drew its smallest ever audience on December 23, averaging an estimated 2.65 million viewers,” Programming Insider reports. “To put that in perspective: the 2024 broadcast averaged 4.1 million,” the media ratings website noted."

PSO challenge: It’s not easy building the audience of the future; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/18/15

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; PSO challenge: It’s not easy building the audience of the future:

"While the PSO has not suffered the catastrophic decline that forced orchestras in Philadelphia, Syracuse and Louisville to declare bankruptcy, attendance has plunged since the 1970s, when it sold more than 200,000 tickets to its classical-concert series, compared with 96,610 last year. Last season, just 57 percent of seats at Heinz Hall were sold; the rest were given away or unfilled.

To learn why, the PSO hired a North Carolina firm to interview people who are typical of symphony goers (white, married, middle-aged and middle- to upper-income) but who don’t attend. Their responses may be useful in attracting that demographic, but the symphony also needs to get answers from minorities and millennials if it wants an audience for the future.

In 1937, the median age of audience members at classical concerts across the nation was 28. By 2008, it had risen to 49."