captive audience

Idioms  

1. 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.”

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Example Sentences

Brooks also said the detainees have stated a plausible claim for battery in that Karas intentionally concealed the details of a treatment in order to induce a captive audience to take a particular drug for his own professional and private aims.

From Seattle Times

Netflix knew it had a captive audience, thirsty to learn more about Korea, their appetites whet by the likes of Squid Game and Extraordinary Attorney Woo.

From BBC

The show's Pam, played by Renée Zellweger, crows her virtues to the captive audience inside her head.

From Salon

Although its initial popularity seemingly owed much to a captive audience of lonely, bored and sheltered-in-place users, the company’s head of global marketing, Maya Watson, emphasized to The Times that Clubhouse “wasn’t launched to be a pandemic solution.”

From Los Angeles Times

This new bill, which proposes stiff penalties on companies that try to coerce workers to oppose a union drive or that retaliate against workers who support one, and would ban forced attendance at "captive audience" meetings, would reinstate the persuader rule and require union-avoidance firms to disclose more information about their services.

From Salon