Imagine the collective ugly surprise when millions of people sat down for a penultimate edition of “Survivor” last night and got President Bush’s non-news conference instead. A lot of folks stayed tuned, however. The Big Four networks averaged 32.8 million viewers for the hour-long session. That’s a 23 percent increase over viewership for this year’s State of the Union speech.

Now it will be interesting to see what all those viewers thought of Bush’s plan for privatizing Social Security and his helplessness in solving the gas price crisis.