By the Numbers
By Larry Johnson on October 22, 2008 at 7:33 PM in ABC News, Advertising, Air America Radio, Barack Obama, Bush/Cheney, CNN, Current Affairs, Fox News, Joe The Plumber, MSM, Media, Media Bias, NBC, Sarah Palin
The disaster of the Bush Administration and the tarnished legacy of the Republican Congress would normally spell doom for the Republicans in the November election. But then you learn that the Democratic Congress is held in lower esteem than even the Bush Administration. I agree that the trend lines for McCain do not look good, but we are not seeing a flood of support for Obama either.
I would like you to think about some numbers:
In the 2004 Presidential election there were more than 122,000,000 votes cast. In 2006 for the Congressional race, which put the Democrats in charge of both the House and the Senate, 80 plus million people voted. I was surprised that 42 million folks decided not to vote.
Now look at the media numbers. According to Drudge Report, the number of folks watching nightly network news is less than 22 million:
CBSNEWS w/ Couric shed a half a million viewers, falling from 6.4 million to 5.9 million;
ABCNEWS dropped from 8.1 million to 7.6 million;
NBCNEWS slumped from 8.2 million to 7.8 million.
The numbers for cable shows is even less. Fox News, with O’Reilly Factor and Hannity and Colmes, sits atop the heap with around 4.3 million viewers. CNN and MSNBC combined rarely exceed 4 million viewers. Let’s be generous and assume that no one watches more than one show and that the “viewers” are individual and unique. For the national news shows we are talking around 30 million people tops.
Radio, by contrast, reaches over 160 million people each day. And conservatives appear to continue to dominate in this market. Rush Limbaugh, for example, attracts around 14 million listeners. (Note–I have not located a comprehensive summary breaking down total numbers for conservative vice liberal radio stations. If you have it please post below or send me an email and I’ll update this piece)
So where are most of the people who are voting getting their information? It looks to me like radio, rather than network television, is the key medium. I’m also curious about the televised medias’ constant drumbeat against Sarah Palin while she continues to to draw record crowds to her events. Sarah’s authenticity, like that of Joe the Plumber, has struck a chord with average Americans that the media elites don’t comprehend.






















