• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 1, 2012

Thursday afternoon: a live White House event to unveil portraits of George W. Bush and his wife Laura. All three major cable news networks carried the event.

One day before, ratings were released showing that the three networks were down for May versus a year ago.  Any connection, you say?

Sure, we know 24-hour news networks have a lot of time on their hands – lots of news segments to fill up. It’s all about feeding the beast, as they call it.

Still, isn’t this a big Presidential election year? Shouldn’t viewership be at its highest point?  Last year, there was the big earthquake in Japan, and the “Arab Spring,” to name two big news events. And in May specifically, the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden. So there are some harder comparisons here.

But we are electing another president. We have an economy still not quite right. We have the Supreme Court mulling the idea that the Affordable Health Care Act may be unconstitutional. There is also Greece to consider.

We must be missing the earlier part of the presidential race: the Republican wannabes. We haven’t seen too many crazy-sounding, always-entertaining Republican presidential debates in a while. Now, we are left to ruminate over every word of the Republican contender still standing, Mitt Romney, in his looking-more-relaxed state -- even with Donald Trump starting to stir the crazy pot.

Perhaps all the shouting about politics and other big news events has left U.S. viewers a bit fatigued. In May, they seemed to want an early summer vacation.

The New York Times notes that Fox viewership for several key shows are at their lowest levels since 2008 -- the last time there was a presidential election. Now what does that mean?

You could paint a picture.