encouraging news about the news

[miriam_e]

I like to watch Hank and John Green's scishow and crashcourse (history, chemistry, biology) vlogs on YouTube. Recently they made a questionaire in an attempt to understand their audience better. One of the questions they asked was How much time do you spend watching TV per day? The results tell a very interesting story.

		Response percent	Response count
0-1 hours		55.8%	70,807
1-2 hours		28.1%	35,717
2-4 hours		12.4%	15,727
4-6 hours		2.8%	3,516
more than 6 hours		1%	1,131
		answered question	126,898

A pity they didn't make a separate category of zero hours for people like me who don't watch TV at all, but considering how few TV programs are less than 1 hour long I wonder if most of those who chose the 0-1 hours category meant zero hours. Admittedly this is a self-selecting population of net-heads. Nevertheless, the numbers and the trend are very encouraging.

Radio has been in slow decline for some time, especially the news programs. Newspapers are currently experiencing a crisis with their readership disappearing. TV has had a problem trying to attract people back to news and current affairs programs, but I didn't realise how many people are tuning out and ignoring TV altogether.

The mainstream media are poisoning themselves to death. Radio, TV, and newspapers could have been (sometimes were) socially useful. I wish that they had been responsible citizens and reported honestly instead of becoming fear-mongering propagandists, but they didn't, so good riddance to them. I can hardly wait for their influence to dwindle to merely a distant bad memory.