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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (a few highs from Fri., Sept. 19 to Thursday, Oct. 2)

By ED BARK
Persistent health problems and recurring medical tests have kept me from these appointed rounds for a while. So it's time to play just a little catch-up by comparing audiences for Thursday night's 90-minute VP debate and the previous Friday's first presidential face-off.

So with pocket calculator firmly in hand, here are the D-FW breakdowns for Joe Biden vs. Sarah Palin, ranked in the order of total homes watching on five broadcast and three cable stations (post-game blab not included):

TOTAL HOMES FOR VP COMBATANTS (Oct. 2)

ABC cov. on WFAA8 -- 199,719 homes
FNC -- 151,007 homes
NBC5 -- 131,522 homes
CBS11 and CNN -- 126,651 homes each
Fox4 -- 94,988 homes
PBS cov. on KERA13 -- 46,276 homes
MSNBC -- 34,098 homes
GRAND TOTAL -- 910,912 homes

TOTAL HOMES FOR FIRST PREZ DEBATE (Sept. 26)

WFAA8 -- 175,363 homes
Fox4 -- 138,829 homes
FNC -- 112,038 homes
NBC5 -- 90,117 homes
CBS11 -- 85,246 homes
CNN -- 60,890 homes
MSNBC -- 34,098 homes
KERA -- 24,356 homes
GRAND TOTAL -- 720,937 homes


It all adds up to this. Joe ("fact of the matter is") Biden and Sarah ("hey, can I call ya Joe") Palin outdrew the heads of their respective tickets by a sizable margin of 189,975 homes in the D-FW viewing area.

The lead dogs likely weren't helped by having to open on a Friday night, when many potential viewers instead might have been out and about or in fetal positions over the stock market mess. Still, that's quite a gap.

Reality check: Last Sunday's Cowboys-Redskins game averaged 879,252 D-FW homes on just one channel -- Fox4. At its peak, in the final 15 minutes, the tote board jumped to 962,062 D-FW homes.

That last number is more than 50,000 homes higher than the seven-network aggregate for Thursday's veep-fest. As for Barack Obama and John McCain, they were never in the ball game.