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Super Bowl ratings: Major drop in TV viewership, major surge online

You knew something was up when CBS didn’t release its preliminary Super Bowl ratings on Monday afternoon as usual.

The Super Bowl is always the most-watched television event of any year, so each year it’s a matter of whether the numbers will match the prior year ... and what to say in the event they don’t. When the numbers didn’t show up, veteran media observers speculated that the league and CBS were doing all they could to spin bad news into good.

As it turns out, that’s pretty much what happened. CBS’s Tuesday morning press release announcing the viewership employed a symphony of creative language and selective statistics, referencing a “total audience” of 96.