I have previously written that I believe there are now two electorates in the US. One is a pretty small one that consists of people like the readers of this blog and others like it and faithful viewers of the cable news yappers of the left, right & center – the voters who pay a lot of attention to and know a lot about politics. The other is a much, much larger group that pays almost no attention to politics or government.
There’s new evidence of big the gap is between the 2 electorates. It’s from a recent New York Times story about cable ratings.
Mr. Cooper had 211,000 viewers to 223,000 for Mr. Olbermann’s repeat. That meant Mr. Cooper finished fourth and last in the 10 p.m. hour because, besides being well behind the leader, Greta Van Susteren, who had 538,000 viewers, he was also beaten by a repeat of Nancy Grace’s 8 p.m. show on HLN, which averaged 222,000.
Think about those numbers! There are over 300 million people in the country!
A smart blogger who I told about this responded that he thought all those who watch these cable shows are bloggers or journalists.
Let’s compare them to some other cable shows.
Over 5 million watch Jeff Dunham (?) on Comedy Central.
Just fewer than 5 million watch Spongebob
And 4.8 million watch WWE Raw.
And compared to that dinosaur – broadcast TV, the cable news numbers look even worse.
Last Wednesday, 17 million watched the World Series, 8 million CBS, 6 million ABC & NBC and 3.6 million watched Univision.
And it’s not like the bigger names in Cable are reaching a vast audience either. The “giants” of cable news do much better but still reach a puny number of viewers (O’Reilly, Beck & Hannitty reach 2-3 million a night) in a country where 130 million voted for President last year.
To put a local political edge to it – less people watch Anderson Cooper than voted in the recent Democratic Primary Runoff. And the Runoff numbers were so low that some people say we should eliminate runoffs. But I bet the same people who think the runoffs are a waste are faithful viewers of cable news.
And there’s nothing wrong with watching cable news.
I watch cable news. And I’d go on any of those shows I have just denigrated if they asked me to.
Cable news does sometimes play an important role in our politics. But that’s only when a story they report gets picked up by those parts of the media that bloggers & cable news say is dead or dying.
It’s true that many, many fewer people watch the broadcast network news shows and read daily newspapers than they did before we had cable & the internet. That is one reason why I think we now have two electorates.
But here are some numbers to consider – over 20 million watch the one of the three national TV news shows, 4 times as many read USA Today as watch Greta Van Susteren and more people read the Newark Star-Ledger than watch Anderson Cooper.
In other words, despite all the changes that have occurred in the last 20 years, any news that starts out with Keith or Rachel or Campbell or Sean must get to broadcast news and newspapers if it ever going to actually affect the voters who decided elections.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004030296