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Townhall
Politics
Ain't Beanbag
by Rich Galen
Mar 29, 2013
Among
the many very nice comments I
got for Wednesday's MULLINGS (Our Talking Points Society) was a reader
who
asked (in essence) "If Fox News Channel is so far ahead of MSNBC and
CNN
why did the GOP lose the Presidential election last Fall?"
The
answer is: The number of people
who watch cable news is a tiny percentage of the voting population.
According
to TVNewser.com the total
number of people who tuned into any of the four major cable news
channels (CNN,
CNN Headline, Fox, or MSNBC) at any point between 4 PM and 11 PM
totaled
23,430,000 viewers
It
was split this way:
Fox:
12,907,000
MSNBC:
4,516,000
CNN:
2,659,000
CNN
Headline: 3,348,000
Among
all of those, Bill O'Reilly
drew 2,883,000 in his 8 PM show. That's more than watched CNN
throughout their
entire seven hours of programming.
Just
to give you a sense of
context, the highest rated shows anywhere on cable on Monday night drew
13,850,000 viewers just in the three hours between 8 and 11. They were
all the
same show and all on the same network: Monday Night Raw (professional
wrestling) on USA.
And
the top broadcast network shows
on Monday totaled 41,040,000 viewers just in the 8 o'clock hour; 75
percent
more viewers for shows like "The Voice" and "Dancing with the
Stars" than all of cable news for the entire afternoon and evening.
More
data.
There
are (as of last night)
315,572,776 people in the United States according to the U.S. Census
bureau's
"population clock." Most of them didn't watch a cable news show last
night.
More,
still? According to
Wikipedia, 126,838,980 Americans voted in the 2012 Presidential
election. That
means 80 percent of voters (I know this is really stretching the point,
but
bear with me) probably are not regular viewers of Fox or MSNBC, or CNN.
In
fact they are FAR more likely to
have been viewers of "Dancing with the Stars" or "The
Voice."
Ok.
So, most voters are not glued
to a cable news station at night.
That
leads us to the absolutely
ridiculous mini-burst of excitement over Ashley Judd running for the
U.S.
Senate from Kentucky…
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall
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