Bouncing Back in Boston

BOSTON, July 29--John Edwards turned out to be a box-office draw for the Democrats.

But the broadcast networks, which have cut way back on convention coverage, are continuing to lose audience share.

Last night, 17.3 million households tuned into six networks to watch Edwards and the Democrats, according to Nielsen. That's a slight uptick from the 17.2 million that watched Joe Lieberman and the Democrats on the third night of the convention in 2000.

But that's a better performance that Bill Clinton and Al Gore turned in on Monday night, when the combined audience was down 10 percent from four years ago. (Tuesday, you'll recall, the broadcast networks didn't carry squat.) So there turned out to be a curiosity factor about Edwards as a relatively new player on the national stage.

The big news for media-watchers is that political viewers are moving to cable, which takes conventions a whole lot more seriously than the Big Three.

CBS was down from 5 million viewers to 3.9 million. NBC dropped from 5.4 million to 4.2 million. ABC declined from 5.4 million to 4.1 million.

The Big Three have sent the message that they don't care all that much about conventions, and viewers have gotten the message.

On cable, though, CNN's ratings rose from 1.3 million four years ago to 2.2 million last night. Fox was up from 379,000 to 1.8 million. MSNBC jumped from 567,000 to 1.1 million.

The other big winner is PBS, which figures its ratings a little differently. Jim Lehrer and company drew 2.7 million last night, compared to 2 million four years ago. And that gives the Kerry-Edwards Democrats even more of a ratings boost over the Gore-Lieberman Democrats.