Debate Ratings: Fox News Tops Cable News For First Debate, As More People Tune In Than 2008

This is an easy record, beating the 45.8 million households watching the Reagan-Carter debate. See http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-most-viewed-presidential-debates-in-tv-history-2012-10-02 for some historical debate figures.

Thanks for posting, added some keywords

Nice to see MSNBC in third place again as they should be. They lately for the last year or so have bested CNN in most ratings.

Now the leftist media will try to tell us that we did not see what we saw.

Good. Thanks. I wanted to get this one up ASAP, so didn’t fill those in.

What a great time for Romney to come up with a stellar appearance!

As I wrote on the preliminary thread I put up in chat while waiting for a good article to post, this incredible viewership as well as the CNN poll with Romney beating Obama 67-24, plus the just mentioned (on CBS radio news) of “People view Romney more favorably due to the debate” = 56%, “... Obama more favorably...” = 13%, ...

I believe this will may move the needle far more than the “pundits” have been stating.

There is only one reason that people were tuning in, and that is to see whether Romney might be up for the job, and they tuned in at record numbers.

Maximum “fire for effect”.

I think CSpan was the best site, no crawl on the bottom, and no drama

Larger FNC numbers indicate GOP enthusiasm the highest. Lower MSNBC ratings indicates leftists are not enthused. Am I wrong here? Could this be a surrogate measure of turnout on Nov 6?

CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, that is 40 million left leaning viewers who saw Obama as he really is, although I don’t know how much, it is still going to be serious damage since 40 million saw it.

I think to some extent, yes, that does reflect enthusiasm.

It was really interesting. Fox had on the room of “undecideds” where it was obvious a couple were rabid liberals, and the rest were probably undecideds that were quite moved by the debate performance.

But, reviewing videos and observer questions by 9news.com, they make it seem like there was no impact on voting from this debate.

"I think CSpan was the best site, no crawl on the bottom, and no drama"

I agree. I watch CSpan for the meat and Fox to strip the bones afterward. MSNBC during the commercials for some well deserved schadenfreude.

Very true about the FNC showing the GOP enthusiasm. I had not thought about how the MSNBC number being indicative of the Dem enthusiasm.

I am still wondering now how Rush got his preliminary numbers up at 65M... I may have simply not heard correctly, though.

The bottom line, though, despite the left-leaning channels having over 40M watching them, that 60 Million Plus people were watching this debate. Try as they like, the Dem spin machine is not going to be able to override what they saw and heard themselves.

In addition, many of these folks were actually trying to get the unfiltered news for themselves, and for one reason: they were looking for a reason to vote for Romney.

I watched the Frank Luntz group as well. I just can’t ever tell about those groups of ‘undecideds.’ If they were truly undecided and became this enthusiastic for Romney, I’m thrilled. The token hipster liberal guy in the front row was still hanging on to ‘hope, change.’

>>> ... 40 million left leaning viewers who saw Obama as he really is ...

I don’t pay too much heed to which won the ratings war.

But the point you’re making is worth repeating, no?

I think that guy in the front row of the Luntz group was a typical university professor... LOL

He sure didn't see the same debate most of us did:

I agree; I took a Freeper’s advice and watched on CSPAN. I was very pleased. Not having to listen to Megyn Kelly was a plus, too.

“There is only one reason that people were tuning in, and that is to see whether Romney might be up for the job, and they tuned in at record numbers.”

I agree. Folks wanted to see unfiltered versions of Romney, and maybe even unfiltered versions of Obama. They clearly don’t trust the pile of lies the media has been feeding them and want to see for themselves as a consequence. And that’s a good thing for us.

Yes, I see it as the impossible, Romney actually chipping away at the 47%! We may have to start calling it the 45% or the 43% LOL.

Full debate here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/first-presidential-debate-2012-video_n_1938234.html?utm_hp_ref=barack-obama

Reading a couple of the comments here, and thinking about this difference between the channels people chose to watch on:

I have to agree that the FNC feed is more of a problem to watch due to the crawler display. I bet that without that crawler, FNC’s numbers would have been even higher.