Faux "News" to be renamed Faux Snooze.....

[Tilted]

I find the results very difficult to believe. The average lifespan for men and women in this country is still in the low 70's. With any large sample, "average" and "median" usually come out very close. Since FOX usually wins the under 65 demographic, it would have to have a *HUGE* spike in the over 65 crowd.

This would be close to statistically impossible.

I was thinking the same thing when I first saw this. But, after I thought about it for a few minutes, I realized what is likely going on - what is probably actually being measured.

It's not that the average age of all the people that view Fox News Channel at some point during a day is 65, it's that the average age of a viewer at any given time is 65. In other words, it is weighted for the amount of time that someone watches. They probably looked at the viewership of individual shows (1/2 hour slots or hour slots or something like that) and compiled the total average based on that.

There might be a million 40 year olds and a million 75 year olds that watch FNC, but those million 75 year olds may watch for much longer (i.e. 2.5 X as long). It would make sense that older viewers would be able to watch more. A 37 year old may only be able to catch a couple of hours of programming between work and sleep, whereas a 78 year old might be able to sit around and watch 8 hours a day (or have the TV on in the background).

Anyway, that's the only thing I can think of to explain it - otherwise, I'm inclined to believe it's BS as well.

 

[Tilted]

Actually, you know what it is - the article that Media Matters quoted from misreported the findings of the survey as referring to the average age of viewers rather than the median age of viewers.

 

[JoeRider]

Actually, you know what it is - the article that Media Matters quoted from misreported the findings of the survey as referring to the average age of viewers rather than the median age of viewers.

There's a perception that DVR users are generally a young bunch, in their 20s and 30s, and that's why the median age for time-shifted viewing is a decade younger than the live viewing age. But actually the heaviest DVR users are ages 50-64. Thus it's more a case of who's not time-shifting that accounts for the lower median age. People over age 65 do very little time-shifting, but they do a lot of live TV watching, and so time-shifted viewership tends to be younger because it does not have that group pushing the median age up. That's just one of the observations in the latest median age report by veteran researcher Steve Sternberg, written for Baseline, a New York Times company. The report finds that the CW remains the youngest-skewing network, at 33, followed by Univision at 36, Fox at 44, NBC at 49, ABC at 51 and CBS at 55. NBC aged the most from the previous year, up two years, while CBS and ABC each aged a year. The CW, Fox and Univision were even to the previous year. Sternberg, who blogs at www.thesternbergreport.com, talks to Media Life about who's getting older, who may get younger, and why cable has an impact on broadcast.

Media Life Magazine - Who's really time-shifting? Not just kids.