Nielsen Media Research reported this afternoon that john McCain got 38.9 million views for his convention speech. That's .5 million more than Obama the previous week. but did he REALLY get that many? Probably not, and here is why.... Thursday Night Football statistical bleed over.

NBC got 13.6 million viewers for the football season opener. And it then got 8 million for the convention. However, the game ran over and ended a few minutes into the 10PM EDT time slot. Ratings are typically done in "chunks". Radio does their ratings in 3-4 hour frames, but TV obviously does it by hour or half hour. So, the "bleed" from football might have been a few minutes, but it technically fell into the 10PM EDT time slot. So, even if all of them turned off their TV, they factor in to the "convention" ratings. I dont know the specifics, but I bet a million or two were statistical anomalies rather than actual views.

How do I back this up? CBS went from 7.3 million for CSI to 5 million for the convention. Last week, CBS drew 4.6 million to hear Obama's speech. So, you would think that if CBS went up .4 million from last week, you'd see similar numbers across all the networks. But NBC is an anomaly.

Last week, Obama drew 6.1 million on CBS.. this week it was 8 million. a 1.9 million person increase. Yes, 4.75x more of an increase than CBS. That strikes me as a bit odd. I havent seen numbers for other networks, but I'd imagine we'd see similar numbers.

So, clearly NBC is an anomaly. Are they legitimate viewers? Or just a statistical blip? Honestly, you cant really know for sure. But, my money is that he got less viewers than Obama. But even so, 35-38 million is still darn impressive.