The Kennedy Center defended Donald-Trump’s 2025 Kennedy Center Honors audience performance despite the ceremony hitting an all-time low, calling the comparison to previous years’ broadcasts “evidence of far-left bias.”
“Comparing this year’s broadcast audiences to previous years is a classic apples-to-oranges comparison and evidence of far-left bias,” Roma Daravi, vice president for public relations at the Kennedy Center, said in a media statement. “The program performed extremely well across all key demographics and platforms, despite industry and timing disadvantages, including a Tuesday broadcast date, two days before Christmas.”
Daravi’s comments come days after final ratings for the 2025 ceremony, which was televised on Tuesday, Dec. 23, placed the show at an audience of 3.01 million viewers while it aired on CBS and streamed live on Paramount+, according to Nielsen live plus same-day big data and panel figures. The final audience solidified what suggested it would be the lowest Kennedy Center Honors audience to date, falling below the 4.1 million viewers brought in for the 2024 ceremony, which at the time marked an all-time low for the event.
While the 2024 Kennedy Center Hon around Christmas.
“With overall TV usage down about 20 percent year over year, the broadcast remains tied for first among adults ages 25-54, alongside a live NBA doubleheader,” the release continued. “And on social media, Honors garnered 1.5 billion impressions in a single night, compared to just 50 million similar impressions last year. It was a successful evening celebrating the outstanding achievements of our honorees at the Trump Kennedy Center.”
While declining linear viewership has been a hindrance for most major awards shows in recent years, 2025 has seen several major awards shows experience year-over-year increases in viewership, including the Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, Tonys and VMAs, some of which were boosted by the addition of a streaming arm to the ceremony. The VMAs had a six-year high in viewership when it was simulcast on CBS for the first time, while the Oscars drew the biggest audience the awards show had seen in five years with 19.7 million viewers on ABC and Hulu.
Although the Kennedy Center Honors has not changed broadcast sites on CBS since its debut in 1978, the ceremony has leveraged Paramount’s streaming arm of Paramount+ in recent years, even moving from the ceremony being available to watch to premium live subscribers and essential-tier customers with access to the stream the next day to a live broadcast on Paramount+, meaning even essential-tier viewers could stream the show live on the streamer in 2024 and 2025.
Much of the ratings drop can be explained by the boycott of the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors by a strong contingent of potential viewers outraged by President Trump’s renaming of the Kennedy Center, formerly the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, to the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” announced by press secretary Karoline Leavitt on December 18, a few months after Trump took over as president of the venue.
