Friday, President Obama made his most extensive speech regarding Edward Snowden’s “avalanche” of NSA leaks and discussed a few of the changes he will make. Did you hear about it? Probably not, according to a new Pew Research poll.

Just 8 percent of Americans heard anything substantive about the speech, which was exactly the point. It’s a tried-and-true public relations tactic to hide bad news on Fridays (especially a Friday before a three day weekend), and anything having to do with the NSA has, unequivocally, been bad news for the President. Early polls suggested that President Obama’s approval rating dropped eight points in the month following Snowden’s first leaks, as it turns out people don’t like being spied on. It’s given left-leaning free Internet types and conservatives alike ammunition to bash him, and it’s a topic he’d probably wish would go away.

NSA surveillance is, as John Stewart called it, a “lose-lose” for the President: “The danger of terror is real—we gotta let the NSA do it’s job. The danger of government overreach is real—we gotta stop the NSA from doing its job.” 

Obama’s speech, and his accompanying executive directive, did make some cosmetic changes to the way the NSA does business. But anything short of disbanding the NSA wouldn’t be enough for some of his critics, and he and his advisers knew that the speech doesn’t call for any true change. Hence, hide the speech on a Friday.   

Time will tell if Americans will eventually read up on Obama’s changes, but for the time being, it’s looking like the strategy worked. Half of Americans said they had heard “nothing at all” about Obama’s speech, and 41 percent said they heard “a little,” meaning they heard he gave a speech but know nothing about it. Three quarters of those who had at least heard something about the speech said that the changes would make “no difference” to increase protections on people’s privacy. 

There’s two ways to interpret this poll: Either people simply don’t care about NSA surveillance, or they’ve already made up their minds about it, and don’t want to hear the President drone on about it. 

The evidence suggests Americans are more worn out about the issue rather than apathetic. According to PEW, 40 percent of Americans approve of NSA surveillance, down from 48 percent of people in June. Among Democrats, the percentage fell a fifth, from 58 percent approval in June to 46 percent. 

The poll suggests public sentiment is turning on Obama, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they stand with Snowden. Though a majority of Americans now believe that Snowden’s leaks have served the public interest (45 percent believe they’ve served, 43 percent believe they’ve harmed), they still think he should be prosecuted, by a 56 percent to 32 percent margin. 

Still, with this issue, perception is everything, and if Obama knew it wouldn’t make a difference, it makes sense to make it on a Friday morning before a holiday weekend.

By this point, it has become PR 101 (several communications schools have published studies on the subject) to dump bad news on a Friday. Businesses are 20 percent more likely to issue earnings announcements on Fridays, and those announcements are 50 percent more likely to fail to meet analyst predictions when they happen on a Friday. Whether the public buys it is another story altogether. 

PR experts say that in the age of social media and the 24 hour news cycle, there’s no good time to make a bad news announcement, and that anything can go viral at anytime. And a study out of the University of California-Berkeley found that when businesses report bad earnings summaries on Friday nights, markets are sometimes fooled for a day or two, but no longer. 

To be fair, there’s a chance that, for some reason, Obama couldn’t make the speech on another day, and the timing of the NSA speech was coincidental. Obama’s announced that America would be pulling its troops out of Iraq on Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, something many would classify as “good news.” People certainly heard plenty about that speech, but it’s looking like the President successfully buried this one.