Final convention ratings show Republicans, Democrats now have dedicated news channels

    Shown above are the final convention ratings for the prime time hour of the Democratic National Convention. They show that Obama edged Romney in his acceptance speech by about two million viewers.
    Obama clearly has gotten a bounce out of the Democratic convention. In election cycles past the Republicans held the second convention and always got a week or two of bounce out of it. This time the Democrats have benefited. I think they clearly overshot themselves by planning to fill a 75,000-seat stadium and then cancelling at the last minute, and I think the scene of the delegates furiously booing the inclusion of the word "God" in their platform is going to harm them.
    As far as honesty in convention speeches goes, Mitt Romney gets the prize. The speeches of Paul Ryan, Joe Biden and Barack Obama were riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods while everything Romney said was pretty much true, said FactCheck.
    As I said in my earlier posts, I think it's interesting that to a large degree the cable networks have intentionally aligned themselves with political parties as a commercial strategy. Those who watched the Republican convention in its entirety did so on Fox News. For the DNC, ratings for CNN and MSNBC tripled while those of Fox dropped by two-thirds.
    It will be interesting to see what kind of advertising strategies the parties use, if any, in advertising on the opposing party's network.