All the news youse can use

George Rebane

Ever try to find a coherent set of TV program ratings on the web?  I just tried to do it again, after avoiding the frustration for a number of years.  My sweetie-pie and I were having one of our breakfast conversations when the topic turned to a news article that cited how informed Americans were about our country’s basic facts/numbers.  The 18may21article from Rasmussen Reports (cited by a reader), headlined ‘Conservative Viewers Are Better Informed About Important Topics’, got us thinking about the information sources regularly accessed by our mostly uninformed neighbors across the land.

So, we wondered how many people got their daily news from where.  And that again turned out to be a no easy task to google.  After some considerable surfing of various web sites I was able to assemble the following somewhat coherent table drawn mostly (entirely?) from Nielsen ratings.  I look at these numbers as being a snapshot of a noisy time series of viewers of the six major cable and mainstream television news outlets.

Looking at the above numbers, let’s assume that another 50% of our news consuming countrymen (which definitely includes women and others of all kinds of sexual orientations and configurations) get their news from other TV, print, and online outlets, in more or less the same liberal v conservative proportions.  That brings our total of, shall we say, ‘informed cohort’ to about 40 million.  Say, that this cohort is drawn from those aged 20-84 potential news consumers (and voters?) who currently total about 230M out of a population of 331M.  This number ties nicely to the total number of potential voters in the country, of whom only 55-60% or 127-138M actually, on average, turn out to vote.  (2020 was an extraordinary year in which almost 67% of eligible voters voted.)

From the above table we note that between 1 of 7 and 1 of 8 voters get their information from what can be labeled as conservative or rightwing sources.  The remainder get theirs from robustly liberal or leftwing sources (in these pages charitably labeled the lamestream media).  This provides conservatives a core of about 31M informed voters.  Through daily contacts with neighbors, it is these right-leaning Americans who convince the remainder to bring in the remaining Republican votes during elections.

Here you can see what kind of an uphill battle this disorganized core of conservatives have in order to take their message to the news-oblivious masses so that election outcomes are as tight as we have witnessed.  This ideological war is made even more one-sided when you consider the progressive propaganda that is constantly purveyed through academe, institutions, entertainment, and now also corporatist sectors.  Into today’s maelstrom of Marxist thought and values, the Republican party barely responds as it is outgunned in the public square by Democrats who effectively control the majority of the non-news voting community.

Comments

[Walt]

And some bogus news.... "Armed"?? Talk about lying SOBs...
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/05/18/msnbcs-johnson-huge-difference-between-blm-holding-signs-armed-insurrectionists-beating-police/

"MSNBC political contributor and Morgan State University professor Jason Johnson said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that there was no comparison between Black Lives Matter protesters and so-called “armed insurrectionists” at the January 6 Capitol riot."

How many guns were seized? (none)

[Don Bessee]

Another koolaide sot perpetuating the propaganda ministry lies, just like the pony tail of ignorance , it never happened in the full video and they still use IR light to disinfect -

“Like drinking bleach?” Clifton interrupted, referencing Trump’s infamous comment about injecting disinfectant to kill the coronavirus in an April 2020 press conference.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/fox-news-host-harris-faulkner-donald-trump-joke-not-funny-081601282.html?.tsrc=fp_deeplink

;-)