Alex Pareene has a great piece on the strange paranoia surrounding Fox News, in particular its strange need to discredit anyone who writes anything about the network….as if any Fox News viewers were big readers. He links to this piece on how few younger people watch Fox:
One indisputable attribute of Ailes is that he knows numbers forward and backward, both in the ratings and political arenas. In the former, his network has long been the top dog for total viewers, but lately hasn’t had much to brag about in the advertising-important 25-54 age demo. According to Nielsen, in the second quarter of 2013, Fox lost 11 percent of its younger viewer audience as compared to the same time in 2012. Over the last two years, Fox has had a median age of 65-plus for both the full day and for its prime-time lineup. Younger people fleeing the network, specifically in prime time, goes back even further, as the prime-time numbers in the demo have taken a nose dive for five years straight, down from 557,000 to 379,000 in 2013.
Of course, teh kidz are watching less tv news in general. If you, like me, believe that tv news — along with most mass media news — is primarily poorly disguised corporatist propaganda, then you likely regard this as a positive development.
Ron Fournier of course thinks that teh kidz will become radically centrist nonpartisan moderates, who reject BOTH PARTIES, but we’re talking about a man who masturbates to the thought of Bowles-Simpson.
My guess is that it’s hard to predict what will happen to a generation that receives substantially less corporatist brain-washing but it stands to reason that they’ll be less accepting of corporatism.
Baud
But will they also be less accepting of a lot of other things that are worth accepting.
The Other Bob
Buick now has a younger customer base.
burnspbesq
The hotel I’m staying at in Seattle while waiting for the kid to be able to move into the dorm has its TVs set up to default to Fox News when you turn them on.
When we check out I will tell them exactly why we’re never staying at any of that chain’s properties in the future.
? Martin
They have. They’ve rejected both parties to the point of not voting, which is perfectly fine to the GOP as it saves them the effort of having to disenfranchise them.
Richard
Perhaps what the younger demographic needs are libertarians in mullets….
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/julian-assange-sang-and-danced-in-a-parody-rap-video-for-som
fuckwit
You… you… put that image in my brain, and now you must suffer the same fate:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Alan_Kooi_Simpson.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/ErskineBowles.jpg
Sure, go ahead. Imagine someone masturbating to those guys. And enjoy the rest of your dinner.
Roger Moore
I’m a bit less sanguine. I think it just means the big corporations are going to find new ways of brainwashing people.
? Martin
@The Other Bob: AARP has a younger customer base. And no, I’m not kidding. They’re open to members starting at age 50, average age is 64.
Doug Milhous J
@? Martin:
Except that voting rates among younger voters have increased.
Doug Milhous J
@burnspbesq:
Good for you.
NotMax
Less exposure to lead = less exposure to FOX?
BillinGlendaleCA
@? Martin: They come after you when you turn 50. I got the first membership application in the mail about 3 weeks before my 50th birthday.
Gin & Tonic
a generation that receives substantially less corporatist brain-washing
They’ve grown up immersed in it and think they mock it, but then there’s this. They all independently evaluated the merits, I’m sure.
The Dangerman
That comes with a centerfold?
Suffern ACE
Maybe they just want their news less shouty? Maybe they don’t like to invite folks into their homes who try to make them angry and scare them to death.
JPL
The younger generation aren’t concerned about gays getting married because why not. They have tuned out on the 24/7 news but not on issues. That is what Ailes is missing. imo
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: There’s a $35B/yr (US-only) industry devoted to precisely that effort.
Kyle
My generation has too many Reagan-teenager dipshits who thought Alex P. Keaton was cool and devoted their lives to being well-paid pets of corporations and the powerful.
I’m more optimistic about the generation in college now, who have been witness to the Bush/Cheney criminal clusterfuck, the financial meltdown and corporations not even pretending anymore to hide their fucking us all over.
Suffern ACE
I suppose it will be like the great shift in the 70s, when viewers lost interest in comedians who cut their teeth in vaudeville and westerns and dectective shows that had been running since the age of radio. Why listen to my grandfather’s talk radio hosts? Or that Blitzer guy who was sexy during a war that was almost 25 years ago.
geg6
@Gin & Tonic:
In their defense, some colleges (mostly privates, like CMU around here) provide tablets and/or laptops as a part of the tuition. It may very well be the case with this photo, but we don’t know, do we?
bcinaz
teh kids are all about branding. iphones, ipods, shoes, jeans, jackets, xbox, warcrack, whatever. They’re just not into the same branding as mom and dad. And maybe not ready for goldman sachs and exxon mobile propaganda.
Jay S
@burnspbesq: Which hotel chain is it?
Percysowner
@greg6
Or, as in my daughter’s case require the students buy a grossly overpriced brand of computer that has struck a deal with the university. Back in 2005 when she went to college her university made us pay $1700 for a Tangent computer. We could have gotten a better powered computer with a bigger hard drive for far less. We later learned that she should have told the university that she was going to major in either math or art, because those majors had programming that only ran on a Mac, which was still hella expensive but was a way better machine than the Tangent.
Chris
Are the other TV networks doing better in that demographic?
Xecky Gilchrist
@Kyle: My generation has too many Reagan-teenager dipshits who thought Alex P. Keaton was cool and devoted their lives to being well-paid pets of corporations and the powerful.
I know the Boomers told you that but – is it true?
Walker
@Gin & Tonic:
It is a powerful, portable computer that can run every major OS (OS X, Linux, and Windows) simultaneously. it can run every piece of software you might ever need. That makes it one of the most cost effective choices for college.
Joseph Nobles
Half of Fox News’ day is all about readership capture. Well, 75%. But half is exclusively devoted to why you should watch Fox and not other news shows. Most for-profit news outlets do this. But Fox has taken the “we have better information” angle to an extreme. For them, it’s “the other outlets are actively trying to misinform you and destroy America.” It’s not just that you’ll be better informed – you’ll be properly informed.
Watch a Fox News show sometime, especially the “commentary” prime-time shows. There is so little information and so much browbeating about how you can’t trust other sources of information at all, only Fox. And it is not being done because it’s true, which would be one thing. It’s done strictly to keep your eyes on the Fox News channel and its commercials. Even when they are slamming political figures, it’s more about the information coming from them than anything else. Nothing can be allowed to interrupt your viewing habits at Fox.
Well, that’s done for two reasons: one, to make sure you only get your political information from Roger Ailes and his approved talking heads. But two, and the most important for Rupert Murdoch, is to make the money. That’s why it took so long to get rid of Glenn Beck. Even though he was losing money, his captive audience numbers were astounding. He had a lock on his target audience. But finally the inability to sell advertising on his show for that dedicated audience meant he had to go. And go he went. If Fox was only about the message, he’d still be there.
jamick6000
I like the idea of him just gettin a semi when he sees Bowles or Simpson separately.
fuckwit
@NotMax: That’s really interesting. I have lately started wondering if the pathologies of my generation in particular– the last one to get a blast of leaded gasoline-polluted air and dirt in infancy, and the largest volume of it– are a mental disorder caused by exposure to lead.
fuckwit
@Xecky Gilchrist: Yes it is, at least, I was one of those self-centered, nihilistic, narcisstic choads.
the Conster
Whoever said Fox is Sesame Street for seniors was right on, if Sesame Street deliberately kept their audience misinformed and in fear of everyone not white.
Redshirt
I’d ironically buy a sexy Simpson and Bowles calendar.
Gin & Tonic
@Walker: I’m sure that’s precisely the standard every student evaluated it on.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
On Chris Hayes’ show, Steve Cohen (D-TN) just went after the Graham family for their grifting off the government teat through student loans, in the context of the “Trump University”, with one ex-student/current plaintiff who says she had a MBA from NYY. How the hell do you get from NYU to Trump U?
Shakezula
The median Fox viewer is on Medicare, receives SS benefits and watches “news” that regularly decries the evils of government health care, welfare and anything that isn’t gained by the vigorous yanking of bootstraps.
Bwahahaha ha ha haa!
Gin & Tonic
@geg6: At the school in that photo, laptops are not provided as part of the tuition, but the school “recommends” (although does not require) the purchase of MacBooks. Or recommended at that time. So, actually, “we” do know.
raven
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: No shit, she HAS and MBA and she bought that bullshit? I have a problem with the way the proprietary institutions hoodwink the folks that don’t know any batter but that was ridiculous.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@burnspbesq: Outstanding.
Felonius Monk
In case you haven’t already seen this little gem, it should make you feel good because His Daughter is Going to Save the World.
Yatsuno
@burnspbesq: CWAP!!! I knew I was forgetting something! Well shit, I happen to be off early tomorrow.
? Martin
@Doug Milhous J: Increased, but still very low. Low enough to not really matter enough except in a handful of purple states.
Punchy
@burnspbesq: Fox News on default? I’d check the comforter for some serious semen stains. Sean Hand-ity and all that.
Patricia Kayden
@raven: To be fair, she asked for her money back after 6 months (of course, she didn’t get anything back). She had just lost her job when she got suckered by Trump, who she kept referring to as a great real estate businessman.
Mike with a Mic
@Walker:
macs are many things, but powerful is certainly not one of them. Apples strong point is making sure the (very limited) selection of hardware they have runs well with their OS. The downside of this is they are often a generation or so behind other machines, and they don’t use the highest quality or fastest hardware out there.
If you need an easy to use OS, don’t need that much power, and are OK with having middle of the road quality hardware apple certainly delivers. But for those of us who need a powerful computer and care about quality apple falls laughably short.
I can run any major OS on my computers as well, hackintosh has been a thing for a while. Best of all my computers are faster than anything apple makes and use much higher quality parts.
The Sailor
“In the former, his network has long been the top dog for total viewers”
Not so much. Maybe TVs, but not viewers.
When your product is free, and you can talk bars, waiting rooms, old folks homes, airport lounges, &c into having it the default channel, you can assume a lot about demographics. It doesn’t make them true.
I get tired, so tired, of people assuming the given is true, when they haven’t proven the given.
Ruckus
@BillinGlendaleCA:
They stop after a while if you ignore them.
6-8 years after I think it was.
raven
@Patricia Kayden Bah.
Spaghetti Lee
@Gin & Tonic:
I went there, actually. In retrospect, the laptop process was kind of flim-flammy. I was told that some of my classes would require a Mac, which turned out not to be true. Either way, I still have the same Mac, and I’m fine with it-I’m pretty computer-illiterate, especially when it comes to hardware, so I don’t really need something that I can pick apart and rebuild so much as something that works every day and doesn’t have me running crying to tech support.
Baud
@Felonius Monk:
I don’t like Steven D’s posts very much, but that was beautiful.
Spaghetti Lee
I’ve always thought it was amazing just how much hold Fox has on politics and the media when their highest rated shows average maybe a few million people: 1-2% of the whole country, at least the ones old enough to watch the news. Like the Velvet Underground or the Pixies, they have a cultural resonance that seems to outpace their actual fanbase and output.
Baud
@Spaghetti Lee:
It’s not like it’s just Fox and nothing else. They’re part of the broader fabric of the conservative movement. They’re just the most visible.
The Sailor
@Mike with a Mic: “macs are many things, but powerful is certainly not one of them. Apples strong point is making sure the (very limited) selection of hardware they have runs well with their OS.”
Apparently you’ve never heard of Unix or freeware or dependability. As to hardware, name something I can’t run on my Mac.
I’m currently doing 60 FPS of retinal image capture, while the Mac also controls the MEM mirrors and the Shack-Hartmann detector. It took 2 Windows computers.
We saved money with Macs.
Gin & Tonic
@Spaghetti Lee: Hey, now, watch your mouth. Damn kids these days.
I’m actually old enough to have heard Velvet Underground when they were together and active… I think their “cultural resonance” is well-deserved.
Gin & Tonic
@Spaghetti Lee: Hey, now, watch your mouth. Damn kids these days.
I’m actually old enough to have heard Velvet Underground when they were together and active… I think their “cultural resonance” is well-deserved.
Mike with a Mic
@The Sailor:
No I’m a sysadmin. I started with Solaris (which got unix certified before OSX, and OSX is off Free BSD so it’s not true Unix if you get technical) and work with both HPUX and IBM AIX. Apple does not use the fastest (in clock speed or latency) DDR3, doesn’t have the fastest GPUs, and doesn’t have the fastest CPUs. Those are facts, the same can be said about their SSD speeds.
When the new mac pro comes out you’ll be caught up to the basic CPU sockets we’ve been pushing for two years now, and you’ll only get one socket and four memory banks compared to the two to four slots and double the banks per slots I already have. It will get a 12 core CPU, I’ll be running dual 12 cores and update my GPU’s again.
Apple simply lacks top end hardware, they aren’t nearly as powerful as stuff you can purchase from other companies or build on your own. Not that it matters for the type of people who use them, and it doesn’t matter that the hardware is outdated as well.
catclub
@The Sailor: “60 FPS of retinal image capture” Firewire to disk? Just curious.
Chris
@Kyle:
I hope so (that’s my generation). I see a ton of apathy, disillusionment and general “all politicians lie and are out to screw us,” “the government is way too fucked up to be counted on” syndrome, though (and the teabaggers’ paralysis of the government in the last few years has beautifully help to confirm that impression). Plus the South Park Republican syndrome of fashionable cynicism of “I’m too cool to believe in anything, man,” especially popular in the white middle class.
Mike with a Mic
@Chris:
Being in my early 30’s most people around my age have zero faith in the government and a majority of voters. The general sentiment as that the boomers and people of the 60’s can’t get over their decade and are fucking everything up. The question is how much damage they do before they all die off and we can get around to fixing things. But a lot of us don’t believe things can be fixed till everyone who was alive in the 60’s is dead and gone, or too senile to vote.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris:
That’s Jon Stewart’s philosophy as well. Is he back, or is John Oliver still hosting the TDS?
Mike with a Mic
@schrodinger’s cat:
Stewart is more “both sides” and I don’t see a lot of that. Most people know which side is fucked up. We just have no faith that lunatics won’t get out of power till the boomers/60’s culture war crowd is all dead and gone. Then the real horror is picking up the mess. But till they die off, there’s no real hope in believing in government or thinking it can be fixed.
Spaghetti Lee
@Chris:
I have a number of friends my age who I keep up with on FB, and they talk about politics pretty constantly and are very left-wing. A much larger number don’t talk about it at all. I’ve gotta say, I have run into the ‘I’m too cool and hip for politics and I’m going to let you all know it’ stereotype less often than I’d expect, hearing about it so much.
Political activism has always been a long-tail kind of activity though. It’s not like every last college kid in the late sixties was protesting Vietnam.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodinger’s cat: they’re off this week, I believe, and Stewart will be back next week or the week after
The Sailor
@catclub:
It’s an external board with a ring buffer attached to our CMOS camera that transfers thru USB 3. The retinal camera is only a meg, the SH sensor is direct USB, and less than a meg, the software is C++, the mirror is a BMC 144 actuator w/ 5.5 stroke.
But, I’m not a sysadmin, so I have no idea what clock speeds &c are. I’ve never overclocked a Mac. I’ve never rewired a board because the slots were incompatible, and I’ve never written my own drivers, because, you see, I’m not a sysadmin.
Mike with a Mic
@The Sailor:
Then you should realize apple is almost always a CPU socket behind, never uses the fastest memory, rarely uses the fastest CPUs, never uses the fastest drives, and never has the fastest or latest GPUs. Which is the issue, you can’t call something “powerful” when it’s not using the fastest items. The Unix platforms I use have hardware that’s much better than what comes with a mac.
We have some macs at work, I’ve owned a few myself, but they are far from powerful compared to what you can build on your own or even purchase from even HP or Dell.
The Sailor
@Mike with a Mic: I don’t really care about the biggest dick, I need to get research done.
Mike with a Mic
So toss an insult and then bolt when you realize you’re stuck with apple using neither the fastest, latest, or highest quality hardware. Same argument against facts, same tactics, as apples #1 fan, Rush Limbaugh! That was a cheap shot, it’s rude to Rush.
Oh well, go do your work. I don’t dislike macs and I use one off and on. They just lack the hardware for most of what I do for work or entertainment, I’m a power user.
Haydnseek
@Mike with a Mic: Nice troll. History much? This is a generation who fought, bled, and in some cases died in the 60’s while championing civil rights. Yep, it was us, fucking things up for future generations just for the sheer shits and giggles fun of it! I won’t even mention Viet—OH FUCK, I DIDN’T MEAN TO! Yeah, we protested. If we didn’t, we would probably still be there. But we’re old now…..but not so old that we can’t muster the energy wipe our fevered brow with our tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirts and put our noses to the grindstone, our shoulders to the wheel, and labor with the last of our failing strength with no other motive than to keep fucking everything up for the next generation. Oh, and if you could go die in a fire, that would be great.
Chris
@Mike with a Mic:
IMO, what it is for a lot of people (“South Park Republican” may have been too harsh) is this; the optimistic, shiny, “city on a hill” aspect of Reaganism is pretty much dead as far as my generation is concerned. There’s not many of us who still believe the shit about how if we’re just nice enough to the rich, they’re going to make the money trickle down and we’ll all be better off, or about how if we just work hard enough, we could totally be rich too. I think the cynical aspect of the Reagan message, about how the government and the unions and the activism can’t help you, and if they try it’ll just make things worse, though, that’s sticking better than the idealism was.
Haydnseek
@Mike with a Mic: No, Jimi Hendrix was a power user. Lenny Bruce was a power user. Jim Morrison was a power user. You’re just an asshole.
Mnemosyne
@Gin & Tonic:
Apple usually offers a steep hardware discount to students — I think that when I was in grad school in 2001-2003, it was like 30 or 40 percent off retail price. That definitely made it worth it over the various PC offerings.
divF
@Mike with a Mic:
I do S&M (Simulation and Modeling), and for serious computing at our shop we buy whatever gives us the best processing power and memory for the buck, and run Linux on it. Unfortunately, I’m also a low-level bureaucrat, so I have to use Microsoft Office, and still have a machine that is sufficiently Unix-like that I can do development on it in airplanes and cafes. Therefore a MacBook for my laptop.
Lee
Speaking of news…
Anyone watching Al Jazeera America? I watched it over the weekend it is pretty good.
Kay S
Don’t know about that go die in a fire stuff, but I do wonder why the wee ones hate boomers so uniformly…they arent all like Jeb Bush, etc. And, don’t forget the second wave of feminism, gay rights breaking through, yogurt, you know, all that good stuff…all from them boomers. Sorry, wee ones. Back to your games now…
polyorchnid octopunch
@Mike with a Mic: “we’ve been pushing for two years now”? So, which manufacturer do you work for, and why shouldn’t we assume you’re not just another shill for the PC biz?