Second Debate TV Numbers

The first TV ratings are in and it looks like the second debate had a pretty good television audience. Here are the ratings for the individual networks covering that debate:

NBC News...............12.2 million
Fox News...............11.1 million
ABC News...............10.96 million
CBS News...............8.3 million
CNN News...............5.77 million
MSNBC News...............4.88 million

That's a total of 53.21 million people who watched the debate. That figure doesn't include the number of people who watched on C-SPAN, but that network usually lags far behind the others and probably would not change that figure too much.

That may sound like a lot of viewers, but it actually represents a decline in debate viewership. The first television debate (between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon) drew nearly 70 million viewers (and their second debate had about 50 million viewers) -- but the nation only had half the population then that it does now. That means a substantially smaller portion of the voting public watched the debate this year than have done so in the past.

Why has the proportion of voters viewing the debates gone down? Do many people no longer believe the debates will tell them much? Or have most voters already made up their minds? Perhaps it is a little bit of both.