WWTBAM Bored

Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be appearing at dueling town hall meetings tomorrow on two different networks at the same time.

After the scheduled debate tomorrow fell through, Biden scheduled an ABC town hall at 8:00 eastern in Philadelphia hosted by George Stephanopolous. Biden's event will be 90 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of commentary. Yesterday, Trump scheduled an NBC town hall in Miami at the same time hosted by Savannah Guthrie. Trump's event will be one hour.

MSNBC and CNBC will also televise Trump's event, and both events will be available live on various streaming platforms.

The reason for the time discrepancy is that both candidates appeared earlier on separate days on those networks and they are being given the same amount of time as their opponent received last month.

It will be interesting to see what sort of ratings these two events get.

I mailed back my ballot today. I wouldn't watch either anyway. I'll settle on the news clips.

And the verdict is in:

Biden's town hall averaged 14.1 million viewers on ABC, while Trump's town hall drew 10.6 on NBC. When you add in MSNBC and CNBC viewers to the total, that gave Trump a total of 13.1 million, still a million less than Biden.

There was no Thursday night football this week, but a Fox broadcast of the Atlanta-LA baseball playoff game drew about 2.5 million viewers. CBS's Big Brother at 8:00 averaged about four million viewers.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/media/to ... index.html

Biden's Town Hall had the higher ratings.

This of course will be referred to by Trump as "fake."

Donald Trump is getting a do-over of sorts on his town hall. He will have a one-hour event on October 21 (the night before the last scheduled debate with Biden) on the Sinclair Broadcast group, which owns about 55 CW and MYNET stations in various markets. It will be moderated by Eric Bolling and include audience questions (I have a feeling the "audience" will be strongly pro-Trump). The best news about this event is that it will keep Trump from hosting another superspreader rally somewhere that same night.

Bolling was a former business commentator at Fox News who was fired for sending lewd photos and text messages to female colleagues. He is also the author of The Swamp: Washington's Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It. That book was written in 2017, so it doesn't look like Trump did a very good job of draining the swamp.

Sinclair has also extended a similar invitation to Biden who has not replied.