(Photo: Jack Gruber, USA TODAY)

President Obama’s State of the Union Address drew 33.3 million television viewers, the smallest audience he has had for the annual speech to Congress, Nielsen reported Wednesday.

The audience for Tuesday’s speech was slightly less than the 33.5 million who tuned into last year’s State of the Union, according to numbers supplied by Nielsen.

Thirteen networks broadcast Obama’s speech live: CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, Azteca, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Al Jazeera America, Galavision and Mun2. Univision carried it on tape delay.

The president’s first speech to a joint session of Congress in 2009 — technically not a State of the Union but serving a similar function — drew 52.4 million television viewers.

The TV audience for Obama has steadily declined every year since.

In terms of social media, Nielsen reported that 8.8 million people saw at least one of the 2.1 million tweets sent in the USA about the 2014 State of the Union speech.

“Twitter activity about the airing spiked at 9:47 p.m., with 32,918 Tweets sent following the president’s reference to ‘equal pay,’ ” Nielsen reported.

SOURCE: David Jackson
USA TODAY