More Viewers Watched Palin Than The Obamessiah

Yesterday it looked like about a million more people had watched Obama's Greek Temple speech than had seen Sarah Palin, but today there are updated numbers which show that Palin actually beat Obama in the battle of ratings:

NEW YORK (AP) - Barack Obama apparently isn't the only "rock star" in presidential politics this year.

After days of intense media coverage about Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's qualifications, more than 40 million Americans tuned in Wednesday to see for themselves what they thought of her.

The huge audience for Palin's acceptance speech rivaled that for Obama's address at the Democratic National Convention six days earlier, and set a tough standard for the top of her own ticket. John McCain was to accept the GOP presidential nomination on Thursday.

The first two days of the GOP convention essentially served as a build-up for Palin. The Alaska governor hadn't spoken publicly since McCain selected her for the ticket last Friday, as a series of stories circulated questioning whether McCain had properly vetted her.

Her poised speech, primarily going after Obama and touting McCain's case for the presidency, was gushed over by many analysts.

An audience of 37.2 million people watched Palin on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, Nielsen Media Research said Thursday. PBS estimated its audience at 3.9 million, based on a less reliable sample of several big cities. Nielsen does not count the audience for C-SPAN, which also showed the speech.

Last week, Nielsen said 38.4 million people watched Obama speak at a Denver stadium on the six commercial networks, along with BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo - four networks that didn't cover Palin's speech. PBS added an estimated 4 million to that total.

Maybe this explains why Oprah doesn't want to book Palin. She's afraid too many people will watch and overwhelm her advertisers with business.