And, they get beat by pro wrestling when it's on at the same time
it's weird how networks cling to numbers like that, as if it is still 1958, or hell, 1978.
It's important to note that the leading networks--all 3 of them--prior to cable, commanded a share of roughly 200-300 million people.
Murrow and Cronkite and those guys had 100million+ people in their audience. And they did things right. And they weren't afraid of the news, or afraid of their audience. And they had class.
Today, you have these major news networks fighting over something like 17-20million people, that
represent the entire news-watching audience in the US.
insane.
In the mad scramble for this increasingly small demographic, you have blood-letting and low brow entertainment passing itself off as information, just to grab half a million or 1 million more viewers than the other 5 or 8 networks.
Whenever someone makes the argument "more people watch Fox so
we are the majority of the country!" I actually know that they are talking about
a majority of roughly ~8% of the country.
Whenever a mopey hipster bitches about how stupid our country is because Fox is "so popular," I think that some ~4% of the country being "so stupid" ...really sounds about right when you look at humanity overall. It's kind of enlightening, really. Or when some Teabagger screams that liberal nazis are "ruining mah country!", I really wonder if he understands that the ~1% of people that actually watch MSNBC shouldn't be a valid concern in is daily life?