North Texan viewers: Cowboys, then Palin/Biden, then Obama/McCain

by Ed Bark of UncleBarky.com

The vice presidential debate drew a total of 910,012 homes, almost 200,000 more than the first presidential debate.

Persistent health problems and recurring medical tests have kept me from these appointed rounds for a while. So it's time to play just a little catch-up by comparing audiences for Thursday night's 90-minute VP debate and the previous Friday's first presidential face-off.

So with pocket calculator firmly in hand, here are the D-FW breakdowns for Joe Biden vs. Sarah Palin, ranked in the order of total homes watching on five broadcast and three cable stations (post-game blab not included):

TOTAL HOMES FOR VP COMBATANTS (Oct. 2)

ABC cov. on WFAA8 -- 199,719 homes

FNC -- 151,007 homes

NBC5 -- 131,522 homes

CBS11 and CNN -- 126,651 homes each

Fox4 -- 94,988 homes

PBS cov. on KERA13 -- 46,276 homes

MSNBC -- 34,098 homes

GRAND TOTAL -- 910,912 homes

TOTAL HOMES FOR FIRST PREZ DEBATE (Sept. 26)

WFAA8 -- 175,363 homes

Fox4 -- 138,829 homes

FNC -- 112,038 homes

NBC5 -- 90,117 homes

CBS11 -- 85,246 homes

CNN -- 60,890 homes

MSNBC -- 34,098 homes

KERA -- 24,356 homes

GRAND TOTAL -- 720,937 homes

It all adds up to this. Joe ("fact of the matter is") Biden and Sarah ("hey, can I call ya Joe") Palin outdrew the heads of their respective tickets by a sizable margin of 189,975 homes in the D-FW viewing area.

The lead dogs likely weren't helped by having to open on a Friday night, when many potential viewers instead might have been out and about or in fetal positions over the stock market mess. Still, that's quite a gap.

Reality check: Last Sunday's Cowboys-Redskins game averaged 879,252 D-FW homes on just one channel -- Fox4. At its peak, in the final 15 minutes, the tote board jumped to 962,062 D-FW homes.

That last number is more than 50,000 homes higher than the seven-network aggregate for Thursday's veep-fest. As for Barack Obama and John McCain, they were never in the ball game.