Skip to main content

Obama's Ratings Touchdown


By: Joal Ryan
August 2008 - 14:15


Even a football stadium couldn't hold Barack Obama's audience.

An Oscars-esque 38.4 million watched Obama's speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, Nielsen Media Research said today.

Actually, the Oscar ceremony hasn't averaged 38 million-plus viewers since 2006.

Obama's Thursday speech, delivered before about 75,000 at the football home of the Denver Broncos, not only topped this past year's Oscars (32 million), but every night of the just-concluded Beijing Games (which, at its best, scored 34.9 million), and last spring's American Idol finale (31.7 million).

The speech drew more viewers than President Bush's last State of the Union address (37.5 million) and was easily the most-watched hour of this week's Democratic convention.

Nielsen stopped short of outright declaring it the most-watched convention event ever as its data for night-by-night, convention viewership only goes back to 2000.

Also unknown is exactly how many people watched the Obama speech live on TV.

Nielsen counted everybody who caught the speech on one of 10 broadcast or cable channels, but, as is its way, did not count those who watched it on a noncommercial outlet, à la PBS or CSPAN.

Nielsen stats definitively show the Obama speech was the most-watched, nonsports program in African-American households since a Michael Jackson anniversary concert broadcast on CBS in 2001. Obama, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, is the first African-American to serve as a major party's presidential nominee.

Combined with the convention's first three nights, the Democratic convention averaged 27.7 million, making it the most-watched convention, Democratic or Republican, on record. (Again, Nielsen's records only go back to 2000. Also, more networks than ever provided live coverage of this past week's convention.)

After Obama, the week's next-biggest draw was the senator's top rival in the primaries: Hillary Clinton.Tuesday's prime-time coverage, featuring a speech by Clinton, averaged 26 million. Wednesday night, featuring a speech by former President Bill Clinton, averaged 24 million.

The Republican convention is set to kick off Monday.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...

Obesity linked to quantity of sleep!

P eople who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new US study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use. The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don't do so well," Kramer said. The study is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 US adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Centre for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such surveys can't prove cause-effect relationships, so - for example - it's not clear if smoking causes sleeplessn...

Biggest explosion!

Thu Feb 19, 3:58 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said. A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics deter...