TVNewser: Cable News Channels Not Catering To Their Geriatric Audience

Cable News Channels Are Not Catering To Their Geriatric Audience

It's the "dirty little secret" of cable news: FNC, CNN, and MSNBC "focus so intently on the young" even though their audience "is more likely to mull prescription drug benefits than shoot tequila during spring break in Cabo."

Variety's Brian Lowry writes: "Fox News Channel and CNN are two of only three leading basic networks (the other being the Hallmark Channel) whose median viewer age is over 60. Headline News rings in next at 59.9, and MSNBC is still on the rickety side at 57."...

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/generalities/cable_news_channels_are_not_catering_to_their_geriatric_audience_36529.asp

...they aren't catering to any audience.


*Mr. Olbermann not included.

because what else can they afford to do besides watch cable TV? Let's face it, there are only so many times you can watch old movies before you start yelling out the dialog and hoping for a different ending and just so many bizarre sports you can comprehend in a day. They switch to cable news in the vain hope that they'll learn something new.

As for not catering to them, well the advertisers might not have figured out who the audience is, but the cable jerks sure have. Most of their stuff is tabloid fluff intersperced with GOP talking points that reinforce long held bigotries against blacks, women, poor folks, and low wage labor.

The original article that the link led to, from variety.com, was a real piece of shit, complete with yuck-it-up rape trivializing, bigoted attitude toward older people, and even the standard gratuitous Nancy Grace attack thrown in. It was more of a scattershot attack on sensationalized TV "news" coverage than anything else, very superficial. Regardless, there is a real story here, about older people.

I happen to be reading the book "Hard Times" by Studs Terkel--a masterpiece--and it is really making me think about that generation and its ways, as I never have before; my parents were of that generation. One thing that keeps coming up over and over again, and these people mentioned it themselves in the book, is how people back then--1930s, etc.--used to talk about politics, social issues, debate, etc., were up on current events, etc., a lot more than people are now. People entertained themselves by discussing politics and the way things were going in the country, and as someone who grew up in a family where politics was talked about, it keeps you intelligent as you hear about things, and go over them, constantly. People read the paper back then every day, and general interest magazines like "Life," which I also remember as a great magazine. They discussed Current Events and Civics, Government, etc., in school, and any ordinary, educated person knew what was going on in the world and what they themselves thought about it. This was the generation that gave the country the Library as a resource available coast-to-coast, no matter how little money people had, as a right. They regulated radio for the public good as soon as it was invented, as a utility owned by the citizens of this country, with profit a secondary concern the citizens are under no obligation to promote at their own expense. This was a generation that promoted universal education and the ability to read, as a right.

Now compare that with what the media has become, and it makes you want to cry, at the very least, to think of older people, shut-ins, who have been mentally/intellectually active all of their lives, priding themselves on learning about the world, having to endure hour after hour, day after day, year after year, flashy, loud, visual , brain-dead grinning trivia, with no escape. Like being sentenced to a certain kind of Hell. This has been pissing me off for several years now, and the older I get, the madder I get about it, and it is this: they never refer to the past; they NEVER refer to the past. The only thing that exists is an interminable "present." There is no quicker way to become totally brain-dead, with all it implied, than to kill off your own past totally. Dull, bitter, depressed, afraid. To turn on the TV, (for example), and get nothing but a world pitched at teenage boys--only violent music, only trivial "news" that is usually just disguised advertisement, endless video game stories and "techno revolutions," quick cuts and quicker editing, so you can only sit and look, not think anymore. A world that never refers to you or anything you know, no references to anything you lived or would know about, no reference to any world you knew. Problems and fears you wish were addressed, and you go to turn on the media, and the only thing there ever is, are the same horrific grinning people, hyping celebrities and glossing over everything. A media where you are not even welcome, and there is no one like you on it.

It is almost impossible to find serious news or documentaries anymore on TV--and no, I do not mean on pedophiles or diets. There is harrowing hour after hour of entertainment, so that the whole world becomes entertainment trivia and sales. There are only the products of corporations, and all of it is smilingly pitched as wonderfully exciting. Nothing is analyzed anymore on TV, nobody acts like a grown-up, there are no good conversations. This is not new, of course, it was the subject of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman I think it was, and others, but this trend becomes worse and worse every year, until now, it is having terrible consequences, not only for the aged. Young people are getting dangerously stupid, they don't understand the way the government works and so can be duped any old time, and all any of us ever gets is corporate sports/infotainment trivia. This is why I do not blame people for being totally ignorant--where would they learn things? It is not like it is available to them and they are ignoring it. Intelligence itself is totally isolated and maginalized, and to those who want to think, that is a living Hell.

It is not enough to say that people should drop TV and just go online all the time--first, they will not, especially older people, but also, giving up on it would make the media an even more horrific place of stupidity and propaganda. Notice, for example, that Bush's and Cheney's plummeting poll numbers do not correlate with things posted on the internet, but with TV news (especially) finally exposing some of this Administration's crimes, and with the coverage of the horror of Hurricane Katrina and the refusal to help the people. (I suspect that older people probably get their coverage more from CBS Evening News and "60 Minutes," etc., than other places, remembering the great reputation CBS once had, right up to Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, and still think of that as the general news source, as some always will.) When the media directs its news to serious older people, the whole country changes, and is improved. People respond like citizens again, with opinions to things. This country will not improve until the media is re-regulated, and made to address its mission of educating the public, for the common good. It would be a different country.