WASHINGTON — The ongoing resurfacing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has now drawn more sustained public attention than the 21-week war with Iran, according to viewership data released Tuesday by three broadcast networks and one very tired federal agency.
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Nielsen figures show that Day 104 of the resurfacing project pulled 14.2 million viewers across cable and streaming, compared with 2.3 million for combined evening coverage of the war, which has now outlasted two continuing resolutions, one Secretary of Defense, and the phrase “limited engagement.”
“We were fully prepared for the pool to be a two-day story,” said National Park Service project coordinator Marlene Ostrander, who has been asked to comment on the pool 61 times since Labor Day. “We’re applying an epoxy-modified lime slurry to 1,290 linear feet of coping stone. It is, and I want to be precise here, wet cement in a hole. We have a press pen now.”
The unmanned live stream known informally as PoolCam peaked at 3.4 million concurrent viewers on October 9, when a subcontractor was observed re-troweling a section he had already troweled. Traffic to Pentagon briefing streams that same afternoon was 41,000, roughly half of whom were later determined to be defense contractors monitoring their own stock.
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“The audience has spoken, and the audience wants the hole,” said Meridian Broadcast Group analytics vice president Curt Nakashima. “We ran a war correspondent live from a hardened position for eleven minutes and lost 30% of our viewers. We ran forty seconds of a man in waders checking a level and held 96%. I’m not going to pretend I understand it. I’m going to staff it.”
Congress has not voted on an authorization for the use of military force in 21 weeks, though the House Natural Resources Committee has held four hearings on the pool, including one at which members questioned the slurry vendor for two hours and twenty minutes.
Rear Adm. Terrance Puckett, speaking at a Thursday briefing attended by two reporters and a man who wandered in from the pool, declined to characterize troop levels.
The Park Service now projects completion in week 40, which would give the resurfacing a comfortable lead over the war in both duration and total minutes of national airtime.