Thursday, July 2, 2009

Texas Rangers swing for fences, outscore Angels and all four 10 p.m. newscasts in DFW

Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Wed., July 1)

By Ed Bark of UncleBarky.com

The Texas Rangers' walk-off home run win -- after blowing a late-inning 7-1 lead over the Angels -- jacked their ratings to new highs late Wednesday night.

Telecast on Fox Sports Southwest and ending a few minutes shy of 10:30 p.m., Rangers-Angels drew 245,791 DFW viewers opposite the four local 10 p.m. newscasts. That easily beat top draw NBC5's news, which had 159,432 viewers.

The Rangers, now back within a half-game of first place, also ran first from 10 to 10:30 p.m. among advertiser-coveted 18-to-49-year-olds and 25-to-54-year-olds, with the latter measurement the key target audience for news programming.

Women 25-to-54 are far more important to local stations' sales departments, though, and the Rangers still pretty much flunked that test. Here's the gender breakdown within that age group during the 10 to 10:30 p.m. slot:

The entire Rangers-Angels game averaged 166,075 total viewers of all ages. Only NBC's America's Got Talent drew more viewers in prime-time (252,434 in the 8 p.m. hour).

Those are dizzying heights for the North Texas Nine, especially on a cable network. Get used to it. The Rangers' next scheduled game on free-for-all MY27 isn't until Sept. 5th against the Orioles.

In other ratings results, the frenzied, vomit-worthy coverage of Michael Jackson on the three 6:30 p.m. rag mags is being dominated -- ratings-wise -- by Entertainment Tonight on WFAA8. ET averaged 159,432 total viewers Wednesday, compared to Extra's 126,217 on NBC5 and Access Hollywood's 106,288 on Fox4. Poor Wheel of Fortune, which used to dominate at 6:30 p.m., doesn't have a chance against this onslaught. Wednesday's edition drew just 73,073 viewers on CBS11 and also was crunched in the 18-to-49 demographic.

NBC5's previously cited total viewers win in the 10 p.m. newscast competition went nicely with its first place finish among 25-to-54-year-olds.

The Peacock also again swept the 6 a.m. ratings while WFAA8 did likewise at 6 p.m.

NBC5 and WFAA8 tied for first in total viewers at 5 p.m., but Fox4 took the gold among 25-to-54-year-olds.

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Check out Uncle Barky's blog for news of Sandra Hernandez being let go by Channel 33 news.

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