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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I haven't seen discussed is that the average age of a CNN viewer is 64. Building a streaming service around an elderly audience seems like it'd be tricky. That doesn't mean that it is impossible -- Fox News has done it reasonably well with Fox Nation and Fox News viewers have an average age of 68 (just like MSNBC).

But was this programming built for their elderly audience, or was it supposed to be an attempt at picking up a new, younger audience? Who was this for?

You watch a program like CBS Sunday Morning and it's clear they know who their audience is. Each week, they feature who passed away. They feature anniversaries of things like the Godfather and other stuff that their audience will like to reminisce about. A comedian talking about aging gracefully. Etc. But I don't think CNN did any of that with CNN+.

(Source for age claims: https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/24/msnbc-rashid... )

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This is kind of crazy. I always think of CNN (at least in its recent form), MSNBC, and Fox as the most unhinged, sensationalist, rabidly partisan of the mainstream networks. I didn't realize they also had quite old audiences--I wonder if this is just a coincidence or if there's some generational or age-related reason?

EDIT: To all the people saying that younger people get their "unhinged" through social media and other platforms, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation.

I think partisan and sensational is just a human thing. Those particular networks are definitely a generational thing

Generational. Younger generations get their unhinged "takes" from Twitter and podcasts.

I wonder which is worse being uninformed or misinformed. I feel like both are pretty bad, but somehow the misinformed seem worse because people are often unable to reject or form a new idea once they latch onto something.

What's wrong with being uninformed, especially when it comes to "news"?

I agree, very rarely do I actually need to know so-called “news” when you turn off the TV, the sky is no longer falling and the world is (mostly) fine.

Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.

Most news is local. If it doesn't impact YOU, then it's always fine, the world is fine. I'm sure that if you are in Ukraine, turning off the TV doesn't mean that the world is fine when you look outside and see bombs falling on the building next door.

I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.

In a less extreme example, if a big project came into your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this news would make you want to get involved politically to advocate against the destruction of it. But when that happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to even write an email to your local politician to oppose it because you didn't know about it, other families suffered.

It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3 times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it was definitely not healthy and did not make them better citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.

> I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.

I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world (or the other side of your country) if you're not also able and willing to do something about it. I dunno about applying the "privilege" label to that—in fact, the fewer resources you have, the less point there is in it.

> I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world

Things that happen across the world affect us here too. Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and resettling all around the world. They could be moving in down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing what's happening around the world allows one to be empathetic to the situations of others.

How much time does one need to spend on distant news to know enough of it for that purpose, though? If you've got a whole lot of refugees heading to your city, local news will cover it. Otherwise, knowing the basics seems like plenty to me, unless you're just interested in it for entertainment's sake.

I feel that is so privileged of you to say that. You have a duty to know what is happening on the other side of the world when you're American, because the federal politicians you elect decide policy affecting the whole globe, and have done so unopposed by any equal force for over 30 years.

Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have to run the whole empire.

How much time do you need to do that, though? Is keeping up with all the minutia, checking in on how Ukraine's doing every single day (even multiple times), really helping anyone? I do keep up with the news, and especially international news, but I'm under no illusion that it's a valuable use of time. Past very low-levels of engagement, it's a hobby, or a pastime. Like knitting or watching soap operas.

Again, I think that end would also be better served if a high proportion of news media consumption were shifted to citizenship-relevant books (and maybe very high-quality, low-frequency periodicals), probably starting with textbooks and classics in political science, history, and economics (I doubt anyone who's mined those well already, needs any help picking their next high-value read).

>You have a duty to know what is happening on the other side of the world when you're American, because the federal politicians you elect decide policy affecting the whole globe

Nope, not my duty. My duty is to elect politicians who enact policy affecting me. If a politician enriches my country at the expense of another, it is my duty to vote for him, for the sake of myself and my family. No one is a citizen of the world.

You will vote for the people destroying the Roman empire for the sake of Rome? That way lies madness.

> there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.

Watching the news is not helping these people.

> there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.

Hence why I said most. I definitely agree that being exposed to outside events can be important for sympathizing with those affected (and possible helping them), but at the same time, one does not need to be aware of everything going on in the world.

It's interesting how you choose "highway" and not "railway" even though the eminent domain would be the same.

If you never follow news (or haven’t for a decade or longer), it’s difficult to get a read on what is going on in the world or in your country, politically. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but it means you don’t really understand the environment you live in. Getting a better understanding is my main motivation for following the news. Mind you, I’m not in the US and for the most part don’t follow US news outlets.

I don't watch or read news, and I feel pretty knowledgeable about my environment. I feel that if I actually engage in my community I am much more plugged in to my environment than if I try to read about it on the news.

By “environment” I don’t mean the local community, but the general social, political and economic mechanics on the nation scale and planet scale. I.e. how the human world you’re living in works and evolves, which in turn has local repercussions.

> By “environment” I don’t mean the local community

Neither do I.

If you think you're learning about social, political, and economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned anything from the news that I couldn't have learned talking to someone else who watched it instead.

Ah, so you actually do follow the news! I wasn’t particular about the medium.

The benefit of living in a non-democracy is that you don't need to be informed. You can spend all your time on making money and spending money, and that's your life. No worries.

But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time. Freedom isn't free, eh?

Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary. You're only obligated by your own morality. You may choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel guilty about it at all. Right? ;)

> But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote.

I don’t think you fairly addressed his question at all in this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague word: “things”.

People who live anywhere will always take an interest in information which directly affects them, or that they can profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses. Generally there are multiple means of attaining this information and the “news” in the mass media sense is just one of them. I don’t for example pay close attention to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which probably missed important details and which is usually written from a biased perspective. This is true for any number of domains I don’t specialize in (almost all of them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along the way that can shape my future actions.

So lets come back to that word, “things”, which things should people be informed of that you get from the news media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?

That's my point. The "news" is now Maddow or Hannity or Tucker or some other equally wrong talking head. I've stopped watching news altogether and noticed I don't feel like I've missed out on anything.

What does informed mean here? People who watch no news often score better in current events than those that do.

https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...

People who watch no news score better than those who watch Fox News - people who watched literally any other source of news, including the Daily Show were more informed than the 'no news' people.

The interesting thing about the data in the study is that people who identify as Republicans scored higher than people who identified as Democrats, while at the same time, people who watched Fox news scored lower.

Where is that data available? The study I found [1] does not provide a pivot by solely by ideology, only ideology+media source.

[1] http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/

>People who watch no news often score better in current events than those that do.

I was actually referring to exactly this.

Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history. Even the days of the morning paper and evening TV news program were probably a bit much, as far as non-local news goes anyway, let alone today's constant torrent of news, between the horrible 24/7 news channels and the Internet.

> Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history.

I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.

To be a "better citizen," you need pretty deep knowledge of current events. That takes a lot of time, because a lot is going on and it's often more informative to follow a story than just read a summary once it's over. Think of it this way: an investor will lose his shirt if he spends 95% of his time reading classic investment books and only 5% actually researching businesses. Being a citizen is similar.

Also, one of the nice things about the news is it exposes you more to the rough edges and uncertainty of the present, rather than smoothing that over with theory and narratives (that can be thoroughly curve-fitted to the past, so as not to jar you with their wrongness).

Your post is based on the hypothesis that more information is better. We've done the experiment, and it's false. People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation.

The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.

> Your post is based on the hypothesis that more information is better. We've done the experiment, and it's false.

No, it's based on the hypothesis that sufficient up-to-date information is required.

> People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation.

That's a twisted cartoon of the news. If that's how you've actually experienced it, you probably need to pick better sources or get better at separating the wheat from the chaff.

> The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.

That's another twisted cartoon, but I'll say one of the best ways to avoid being manipulated is to actually be familiar with the facts.

It's actually kind of refreshing for someone to defend the news. But I don't think we are agreeing on what news is so it's not an argument that can really go anywhere. I mean if you want to define news as only the Good News and not the bad news then yes the news is good.

> But I don't think we are agreeing on what news is so it's not an argument that can really go anywhere. I mean if you want to define news as only the Good News and not the bad news then yes the news is good.

Quite possibly. You're usage of Good News/bad news there is about the most confused thing possible. There are much clearer ways of saying what I think you might be saying.

> I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.

Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in political science, economics, and history, but who'd never heard of either candidate, would need more than an hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden, for instance. Our choices are, as voters, for better or worse, pretty limited.

Frankly, I often make decisions about local candidates or ballot initiatives based on like 5 minutes of research. I doubt any of those choices would change if I closely followed all those candidates and issues and spent 50x more time on them—what might change them is if I'd read fewer, or different, books. (meanwhile, if I wanted to make any actual difference in the world, I'm aware that what I ought to do is get involved with one of the big two political parties, at the local level)

> Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in political science, economics, and history, but who'd never heard of either candidate, would need more than an hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden, for instance.

That's a bad example, because Trump was such an oaf. A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.

The bigger issue isn't so much picking candidates, but understanding current situation and problems, and having opinions about those things to inform your choices.

Haha, that's fair. I still think spending more than an hour or two on the news per week has rapidly diminishing returns, in terms of societal benefit, and most of that should be local news or very focused, deep coverage, for maximum benefit.

> A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.

I'd love to see some blank-slate person try to judge them just by their own websites. God, those were so different.

>George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.

I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere. The seeds for an event like 9/11 were planted almost 50 years earlier and without understanding that it's easy for people to get swept up in takes like "they hate us for our freedom".

A good point with a bad example. 9/11 really was plotted by Islamists who do actually hate us for our freedoms, since to them our freedom amounts to a rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death. There are no "civilians" in a holy war, since every man, woman and child of the heretical nation are living in defiance of God's law.

Of course, this view is shared by every fanatic everywhere, of every faith, such that the jingo "They hate us for our freedom" applies to them, too.

Japan is even farther from Islamic culture than the United States but they didn't have a 9/11. Why? Because jingoism is subordinate to things that actually matter, like justifying or resenting 50 years of sometimes violent American involvement in the middle east. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be fooled by internally-targeted propaganda from other countries, in a way that's even more embarrassing than being fooled by our own propaganda.

>9/11 really was plotted by Islamists who do actually hate us for our freedoms, since to them our freedom amounts to a rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death.

Osama Bin Laden's own motivations for 9/11 had more to do with American imperialism in the Middle East and less to do with "rejection of God's Law". This isn't speculation, but from the horse's mouth. The "hate us for our freedom" was propaganda by Bush, and anyone who only looks at that, without studying the history of American imperialism in the middle east, starting from the coup of Iran, ends up in the backwards conclusion that Islam is a violent religion (or at least any more violent than any other Abrahamic religion).

Please bear in mind that "rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death" is also a major tenet in all Abrahamic religions. Secondly, there are plenty of Americans who are pining for nuclear war with Russia over Ukrainians; but somehow the blowback of nearly 50 years of foreign intervention by the CIA wouldn't be a motivation for anti-American sentiment in the middle east and instead "they just hate us for our freedom".

They hate us for other reasons too. But I don't think you suicide yourself and kill civilians for geopolitical goals. You do it for God.

Not sure how to respond here. Are you implying that people don't kill civilians for geopolitical goals? Like how Putin is doing now? Or that suicide bombers are a religious thing? Kamikaze Fighters? The assassination of Alexander II?

I'm not saying religion isn't a tool for executing these goals, but the orchestrators have always been acting under geopolitical goals.

Your comment is a combination of strawmanning and shifting the goal posts, and doesn't deserve a serious response. It does merit a question.

What motivates you to resist the simple truth that Islamists hate and wish to kill Westerners for breaking their holy law (the same behaviors we call "freedom"), admire martyrs who suicide themselves into civilians for this purpose? Do you think an Islamist would disagree with any of that? If so, why?

I believe GP and you are talking about two different actors; the individual committing the final act, and the individual rallying others to the cause.

The soldier does not have a larger strategy in mind; he kills for simple and extreme reasons. The government however is rarely so naive, and initiates their wars with much larger goals in mind. Even with a dictator, they represent the filtered understanding of many advisors, and balance the many goals of the group (so almost by definition, they cannot sustain a singular goal with singular purpose for long). The individual just needs one reason to do what he does, which might be as simple as “his boss told him to”.

>What motivates you to resist the simple truth that Islamists hate and wish to kill Westerners for breaking their holy law

Because it's a ridiculous premise that you would not apply to any other religion. It's not even a consistent view of Islam; you don't have Islamists in Malaysia (60% islamic) or Turkey (99% Islam) holding the same sort of contempt with to West.

Consider it this way, if a Russian came to you and said "the Ukrainians hate Russians because they are full of Nazis and they hate how Stalin purged Germany of Nazis" you would quickly realize that is ridiculous notion - Ukrainians are currently being bombed by Russian soldiers which fuels their animosity.

The West has largely done the same in the middle east, and not understanding this history leads you down to conclusion that they must hate the West because of Islam. I don't know how you could look at an entire group of people who have been practically waging a war for sovereignty against a incredibly more powerful adversary for almost _60 years_ and come away that their wish to kill westerners comes from breaking their holy law. Yeah, you can pretend Islam is a tiny part of it, but I think a larger part of that hate is having their government overthrown and then having their children blown up in an air strike.

>Because it's a ridiculous premise that you would not apply to any other religion.

I explicitly said in my initial comment that the slogan "They hate us for our freedom" applies to any fanatic of any religion. You are misrepresenting me, and are drifting further away from a specific point around what motivated the 9/11 attackers. Perhaps you are confused by the difference between Islam[0] and Islamism[1]?

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism

I’m not misrepresenting you. You are just continually ignoring the history in these regions. I don’t think any religion supports your point. “Religious fanatics” are a convenient boogeyman to justify war and aggression. These terrorists don’t exist because of some holy war, they exist because they were caught in the middle of a proxy war between two super powers and witnessed their schools blow up.

People today are vehemently anti-China because of censorship in video games, but somehow it’s a leap of faith that people can be anti-West after their home is targeted in an air raid and we must turn to “religious fanatics”. If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese? What would you think if those Chinese turned around and called you fundamentalist Christian when you voiced those complaints?

If you buy that fact that the Middle East sustained aggression for over 50 years because of “religious fanactism” then you must also believe Putin’s line of reasoning that Zelensky is a nazi because it’s the same kind of propaganda

The "They hate us for our freedom" line was merely a hamfisted attempt on G. W. Bush's part to pander to disciples of 'American exceptionalism' while his search for WMD had foundered & we faced the disgust of the world. I'm not sure that the phrase is even in opposition to God's Law since Bush surely believed that America was subject to God's Law (albeit a different one), yet surely didn't think that American Freedom would suffer for (being subject to His Law). Indeed, while the American Right now enjoys a resurgence nationally and works to roll back LGBTQ and abortion rights in favor of what they deem God would proscribe, they surely won't think that we are any less 'free'. And that is the largest point -- that freedom needs quotes, since its purely subjective.

Let me be clear: I agree that the US has acted purely in its geopolitical (energy) interests in the Middle East, to the great detriment of the well-being of the people living there, including civilians. I also agree that being treated like this can engender hatred and feelings of vengeance. I also understand that leaders habitually manipulate people with whatever tools are handy, faith being a traditional favorite, such that an individual may think they're doing God's will, when they're actually doing their political leader's will.

I believe all of that, yet "they hate us for our freedom" remains an accurate description of the fanatic. It is, essentially, definitional.

>If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese?

You seem to interpret what I'm saying as bigoted against Muslims (it's not, BTW), so I'm surprised you'd make this argument. Furthermore, it's ambiguous what you mean: do you mean anti-China, or anti-Chinese? Yes, I would certainly feel the former, but not the latter. Individuals aren't nations, never were, never will be.

You're only proving the original posters point.

The reality is that post world war 2 soviet containment is the most relevant starting point for explaining Islamic terrorism in the west. Yes, religious rhetoric was used by bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justify their actions, but they only took these actions because western powers (US, Soviets) were playing proxy war in the region for decades.

>> George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.

> I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere.

I'm not arguing for an extreme opposite position (e.g. all current events, no history). If you thought I was, you misunderstood me. I'm just saying it's not being a "good citizen" to bury yourself in the past and neglect the present day.

However, I will say understanding current events probably takes more effort, because history can be digested and presented more efficiently (e.g. for the Civil War: 4+ years of 19th century newspapers vs. a 500 page history).

I recently learned that slavery was abolished in response to pearl harbour[0], which isn't quite a century away.

The vestiges of the later slavery are still around too, well, I guess the slavery is too, but now you have to buy their labour from the government, and the government keeps ownership of the slave. Actually, I don't know how that goes for private prisons?

But pressuring people to plea guilty to crime, perceptions of black people as violent criminals, the large US prison population, the police, etc. Those are legacies and continuations of practices from slavery.

A but more reading on history puts today's problems in better context

[0]: https://weeklysift.com/2014/03/31/slavery-lasted-until-pearl...

The point of the news is to promote a narrative. They choose what to cover, and what to not cover. There is no way to do news that is free from ideological bias. And in large, corporatized media, the ideological focus is often driven by a single person, or very few people.

The purported Twain quote, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do, you're misinformed," applies here.

People love to do comparisons to this or that news organization, "Fox News viewers are most likely to have a Beanie Baby collection," or "MSNBC viewers are most likely to believe that Elvis was an alien," or whatever. It doesn't mean much. They are all entertainment platforms that sell ads.

I’ve found the best sources of news tend to be finance/business focused because the readership generally wants to know what actually happened so they can make business decisions and they can’t make those decisions if the news is heavily biased one way or the other.

There is still bias, of course - The Economist makes it clear they are pro-free market, for example - but they tend to give a decent overview of the most salient facts and they write for a global audience.

misinformed is worse, if only because in many cases those who are misinformed WANT to be that way, and ergo don't care about facts or reality, just their normative preferences.

uninformed is passively annoying, misinformed is aggressively annoying.

I’m a software engineer, and one chestnut I’ve heard (and subscribe to) is “Missing documentation is better than incorrect documentation, because the latter can lead you astray in serious ways.” I think this same logic applies to news as well, for the reason you describe.

Added to which, the news is a business model which increasingly earns its living off manufacturing outrage (not by making its viewers more informed and worldly). The same can’t be said of history books, which is why I agree with one of my sibling commenters here, who recommends swapping most news with reading history.

It's just different age groups get unhinged on different platforms. LoL. Even though TVs are for older audiences, they do use unhinged content from platforms for younger people.

I imagine many millennials and younger realize they don't get much benefit out of watching the news, especially as other media channels (Facebook, Twitter trending, Reddit r/popular) can get them actual breaking news when it happens. If people do want to see more traditional news, having an news app instead of watching it gives them the freedom to read the news when they have the time for it.

Fox isn’t surprising—old people have always been the core demographic for Limbaugh, etc.

CNN’s turn, I think, is all about Trump. Old democrats like my dad are the exact audience for unhinged 24/7 anti-Trump content like CNN has become. These are the folks who built “our institutions” and have the deepest faith in them. Trump’s disregard for those institutions drives them nuts, much more so than any policy.

Younger democrats, I think, are more cynical about everything. They might hate Trump because of his stances on immigration or policing, but not necessarily any more than they hate any other Republican who has the same views. And it’s not going to get them to watch an anti-Trump rant on loop.

I suspect that’s why CNN’s ratings have collapsed since Trump left office. The non-Trump left wing stuff isn’t compelling to my dad. He thinks parents should decide what kids learn in schools, the police should be fully funded, we should thoroughly vet afghan refugees, etc. CNN also lost the Trump-hating institutionalist conservatives they had picked up. My wife was obsessed with Trump-gate while it was happening, but she’s been reading National Review since high school and isn’t going to tune in to hear why government spending isn’t what’s causing inflation.

CNN and the other elder networks drive viewership by telling retirees what to be angry about, providing them with the illusion of being engaged with society. It gives them something to talk about next time they’re leaning on the fence chatting to the neighbor. It’s a far cry from what CNN was in the 90s. But that core audience is now in their 70s.

Network TV in general is consumed mostly by older people.

I don’t think I know a single person under 50 that routinely sits down to watch TV.

> at least in its recent form

Well that's part of the problem, there is an older generation that probably still thinks of CNN as the sober, trustworthy cable news network.

> CNN [...], MSNBC, and Fox as [...] of the mainstream networks

What other mainstream news networks are there? Are you including non-cable news? Because the only other cable network I can even think of is OAN, which is much less mainstream. I'm not arguing whether any of those are/aren't partisan, just that I don't know what you're comparing them to.

Great analysis, thanks. A question is: Do the younger audience rely on streaming platforms/news channels to get their news? Anecdotally, everyone I know in the young age group relies on social-media or web-based portals for their news.

"Elder Millennial" checking in. Since moving out on my own (quite a while ago, at this point) I've never had cable at all. Nor have any of my friends, who span from about my age down to the oldest edge of Gen Z. Nearly all my news is radio in the car (NPR—ugh, but at least sometimes they rebroadcast BBC News and that's decent) or from web sites. Practically all video news I watch is either raw footage, or (similarly) C-SPAN. John Oliver on HBO Max if it's late and I've had a few and I'm bored—that's about it for actual "news programs", if that even counts.

[EDIT] I take back part of that—I think one guy has cable. He's into football. He's also the only right-winger in my circle. Maybe a coincidence? Wouldn't be surprised if a fair bit of his "vaccine hesitancy" (to put it in mild, friendly NPR terms) came from watching Fox News, now that I think about it.

Podcasts have completely replaced NPR for me. I’d highly recommend it.

Something about most podcasts make them really hard to listen to, for me. Not sure why. Among all media I find them uniquely difficult to follow. My attention wanders and I end up missing most of it. Radio-news-style programs are fine, for some reason. All I can figure is it's got something to do with the pace, and the way the hosts speak. I can even tune into weird religious talk programs on the radio, and mostly be OK, but podcasts as a medium just rarely work for me. Which bums me out, because I'm assured there are tons of good ones, but I just can't handle them. Similar formats with video are fine (on e.g. Youtube).

I used to feel similarly about audio but have figured out the right settings for acceleration (1.2-1.4x) and silence trimming in pocketcasts to increase the informational content and keep it interesting - it works for me now. (that and finding the most interesting content for me)

I'll try that! Dan Carlin's works are some of the ones I find easiest to follow, but still too difficult, so maybe I'll try it on him first.

Fox News is pretty pro-vaccine. I just looked through their website and couldn't find any stories against vaccines themselves. Several stories saying they're safe and effective.

https://www.foxnews.com/health/us-covid-19-vaccine-boosters-...

https://www.foxnews.com/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-more-...

https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-vaccination-kids-sev...

I'm not significantly "young" but I get most my "news" from links in telegram chats and places like this.

If it's huge news, I'll hear about it (you can't avoid it) and if it is not huge news, why do I care?

The only "news" I get from modern streaming is the Youtubes of Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight on HBO/Crave, I get the rest of my news from Twitter (where I follow various local journos and CBC).

Which I know isn't ideal and I should pay for a proper news source but the state of "print" journalism in Canada is really, really bad right now since all the non-government-run services are being bought up by ideological conservatives.

I secind late night shows to get news. They have a bias that is totally clear (and one I share, most of the time), are well curayed and researched (so I don't to have news all day) and are presented in a non-so-serious way (making digestion easier).

In additiok to that we have dogital subscriptions to NYT, WP and physical ones for Wired and our local newspaper. Anytheing else is the non-subscription stuff from reliable news papers. I did reduce news consumption a lot so since the Ukraine war started.

Oh, and not to forget: HN.

FWIW: Fox Nation is much smaller in scope. It's basically a bunch of opinion shows (barely more than podcasts, honestly) designed to feed into a cyclic link sharing ecosystem that already exists and is somewhat starved for "legitimate" content. Basically these are links that people who are being fed Breitbart and InfoWars stories click on, because they're "serious news" they can't otherwise get on the internet.

(Also, IIRC most of their revenue is still advertising from freely distributed content, not subscriber fees.)

CNN+ was instead trying to do all this from the ground up, while competing with a much more robust existing ecosystem. Centrists and lefties already have Slate and Vox and Politico and of course all the existing "print" media sites to fill their "legitimate" news needs. What was CNN going to give them that they didn't already have?

Vox, Politico, and definitely slate are not centrist

Of course they want a new, younger audience.

Because in order to be 64, you first have to be 63. It's not like you wake up one day and say, "Well, looks like I have to watch news all the time". These habits accrue over time.

Especially as you get older and you get more involved and have less to do.

I'm a solid middle generation GenX. I rarely watch cable news anymore. When I was younger and had actual cable, I'd channel surf and often end up on one of the news stations if nothing else was on. I still have access to the same channels through YoutubeTV but it's far less conducive to channel surfing, so now if there's nothing on I want to watch, I turn off the TV or pop over to Netflix or whatever.

The old habits are pretty much gone.

I pull up a few news sites twice a day and read a few articles, but I don't watch anything and I rarely listen to anything either. The written articles are usually more informative and contain less partisan stupidity. I can't do podcasts, because I'll inevitably tune them out, hear something important to the presentation, and then spend my afternoon rewinding. Also, the need to be sensationalist is vastly stronger for podcast creators than it is for major media orgs whose networks have cable contracts.

Regardless of what you do, you're not only a sample size of one, but it doesn't mean they're not going to try.

The person I responded to was musing that CNN was doing this to try and crack into a younger audience. And it's like: no shit. They want to either find ways to integrate into more youthful demographics or get more youthful demographics to integrate them into their habits.

Joe Camel wasn't made to appeal to adult smokers.

Maybe this partly explains why some of the CNN+ YouTube clips were getting orders of magnitude more views than the channel itself.

YouTube artificially promotes CNN content. I suspect their content on YouTube would have similar number of views to CNN+ otherwise.

The 64 year olds used to say TV rots your brain, apparently it's true!

It’s the median, not the average. And I think for CNN the median is definitely lower than that, but for FoxNews it’s about right.

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