captive audience

Listeners or onlookers who have no choice but to attend. For example, It's a required course and, knowing he has a captive audience, the professor rambles on endlessly. This expression, first recorded in 1902, uses captive in the sense of “unable to escape.”

Discover More

Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

But, when Deborah makes the ceremony all about her, first having Ava write her speech, and then testing out some of her roast material to her captive audience, DJ comes to the realization that her mother has an insatiable addiction to attention, and that’s why she can never be the mom she always wanted her to be.

From

Last November, Wilcox and a majority of the board voted to bar Amazon from holding mandatory "captive audience meetings" designed to threaten or persuade voters against forming a union.

From

Trump is rarely a captive audience; Budde courageously seized the opportunity to demonstrate what true spiritual leadership looks like.

From

A 2009 study of 1,004 NLRB-supervised union representation elections cited in its ruling found that captive audience meetings had been held in 89% of cases; more than half of the employers had held more than five “in the runup to an election.”

From

The board noted that the 1948 finding that captive audience meetings didn’t violate labor law was “largely unexplained” and “flawed” under the law.

From

captive captive market

Browse