Bill O’Reilly will turn 65 on September 10th, so it isn’t all that surprising that his audience skews old, but his median viewer is seventy-two. That’s astonishing. By the presidential election of 2024, today’s median O’Reilly viewer will be eighty-two. This does call into question Karl Rove’s latest gambit of attacking Hillary Clinton because of her age.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I still can’t get over that stat. Not the average, but the median! So half are even older than that!
You’ve got my interest – after googling median, does this mean that of all the discrete ages of people watching Billo, that there are just as many ages (not individuals) above 72 as below – that can’t be right … can someone clarify?
Okay – I think I get it – “Median age is the age that divides a population into two numerically equal groups – that is, half the people are younger than this age and half are older.” So, as you say, half of Billo’s viewers are over 72 years of age. Jesus Christ – that’s crazy.
It makes you wonder how they sell advertising for the show. Most agencies avoid programs that primarily appeal to viewers over 55 – the thought being that their spending habits are set and too many are on fixed incomes. There’s only so many walkers and gold coins (and, given the show, blood pressure monitors…) you can sell. One would think.
Depends, Viagra, Cialis, laxatives….
One has to wonder what this means for the actual profitability of Fox News. How does this aged target market and its low end product placements pay the bills? How does it “succeed” while going against all marketing wisdom and theory…
Doesn’t make any sense.
When the goal is fascism, the bottom line is negotiable.
Yes, medians and averages frequently are near each other, but not always. Another example would be the median household income.
If someone says the average household income is ~$60,000 you can know that this number doesn’t tell you fully how Americans are doing in terms of financial health because it is including the very rich and upper rich incomes.
Median household income, however, is closer to ~$45,000 (depends on how many are in the household, too). Which tells you that half have higher, but half have less.
I saw a wage distribution chart (forgive the source, it came from a link). It looked very much like a Poisson distribution, with the mode (most frequent wage) at exactly $30,000, if the median individual wage is above that then wages are even more compressed at the bottom.
If this is true then the network will begin to collapse within the next decade.
That process appears to be underway, with Fox having the worst month since before the 9/11 attacks.
Link? I want to revel in it…
First link in post.
The wiki entry?
In ten years, half his viewers will be dead.
Which will mean the physical world will catch up to their brain death that’s already taken place.
Not quite. Using the Social Security Longevity calculator for a male (most probable viewer) born on June 3, 1942, the additional life expectancy is 13.9 years. In fourteen years half his current viewers will be dead, but Fox will have some new a**hole catering to the prejudices of Gen X instead of Boomers.
BTW, you have a 50-50 chance of being outraged by me for another sixteen years, so Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush might be my last President (what a depressing thought!).
If the youngest among half of his viewers (currently age 72) can expect to live another fourteen years, what’s the expectation for those currently over the age of 72? That would be less than fourteen years. And it’s silly not to factor in all those currently younger than 72 and assume none of them will die in the next ten years. (If his viewers skew heavily male, the numbers in ten years would look even worse.)
Use the linked calculator. And begging your pardon, I’m using it for my retirement planning and I respectfully suggest you do the same. I shouldn’t guess a lady’s age but from your past comments I’d guess that you were no more than ten years younger than me.
Those are averages. Perfectly fine for Soc. Sec. as it is the projected total additional years of life for 72 year olds that matters. Take three men — total 37 more years — one lives another five years, a second nine years, and the third twenty-three years.
I’ve never been average on any measure in my lifetime. Sometimes below and sometimes above. Sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot. So, I could die tomorrow or be around to see large chunks of coastal communities disappear.
I’m sixty-five. heh. Never got carded when I purchased alcohol before I was twenty-one, but do get carded for going for the senior citizen rate.
You go! Had my fiftieth High School reunion last year. An old classmate (we met in Kindergarten) told me her Dad is dead but her Mom is still alive and over 100 but has a memory problem. I hope they will have fixed that before you go triple digit. As for me, recent things have started to to slip away but I remember 1963 clear as a bell.
I use the Fidelity calculator that runs hundreds of scenarios to figure out if my money is going to last. I use 130 as a target age. It’s the highest the calculator gives. I don’t expect to make it, but I don’t want to spend principal.
No way am I going to make it to triple digits and I don’t seem to remember much even now. If not for a picture in my 9th grade annual of me with student council members, would not know that factoid. (However, do recall how I successfully avoided taking the mandatory HomeEc class. First key was not telling anyone.)
Hah! Marie, the girl didn’t want to take Home Ec and Voice (Tony), the boy who did want to take it. They had us switch roles for six weeks in Eighth Grade. I MUCH preferred cooking to woodworking.
Good for you. Skipping HomeEc for me was not a desire to take shop but not to waste time on something I already knew how to do. (Much improved after I got “The Art of French Cooking” a few years later.) Toyed with majoring in HomeEc in college — but at that time the career choices with that major didn’t appeal to me.
“The Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child, correct? I’m impressed, but, no, you won’t make three digits eating that stuff. “Saute the bacon in butter”. I just do basic Southern Italian and traditional working class white American like meatloaf and pot roast, roast turkey. Once I made Hungarian goulash from a cook book, substituting margarine for the lard. My Mom said it was almost as good as her mother’s and encouraged me to continue. Grandma, who was a wonderful cook, undoubtedly used lard as well as chicken fat and goose fat. Grandma died at age fifty nine from a heart attack.
Julia lived well and to a ripe old age.
Lard? Never seen in my mother’s or my kitchen Not even the fake lard, Crisco. Bacon grease was dumped. My mother’s first cookbook was an ancient Good Housekeeping book that covered and stressed nutrition and thrift. Lessons she learned well — before he was born we ate as Michael Pollan recommends. Mom was also intuitive enough to figure out that corn syrup, deep frying, and soft drinks were not only expensive but unhealthy. We ate a lot of fresh, localish, in season vegetables. Good, basic everyday food.
Julia is for fun as well as providing techniques that enhance everyday food preparation. A crepe pan is a must.
Lard is a staple of Polish and Hungarian cooking and, I suspect, of Eastern Europe in general. My Mom learned cooking from hers, an Austro-Hungarian native. She and my Polish Aunt (Father’s Brother’s wife) learned Italian cooking the hard way, from their extremely critical Mother-In-Law who was DEEPLY disappointed that her boys didn’t send to Sicily for wives.
Mom had a large garden that I enjoyed helping her with. When I was around ten I helped her bring back a Red Haven dwarf peach tree on the bus. She canned peaches and tomatoes for Winter use and made jelly from our grapes. I’ve had a Red Haven every house that I’ve lived in ever since.
Most of them will not be 82. Most of them will be dead. Life expectancy is 78, 76 for men, and I bet his audience skews male. Probably more than half his current audience will be gone before 2020, and many will before then be so incapacitated that they won’t know whether they’re watching O’Reilly or a fire hydrant. I don’t like to be so flip about old age and death, which are great human tragedies, but that is the reality.
Fox is the voice of the silent generation. With a medium age for the whole network of 69 – the age of the oldest boomers – that means they have as many silents as all other groups combined (few people left older than silents still coherent enough and with their senses intact enough to watch TV news), and the silents are not a large generation and their numbers have been shrinking for a while now.
The surprising result for me is that CNN does as well or slightly better with the under-54 demo as MSNBC. The dynamic seems to be that Fox skews silent, MSNBC and CNN skew boomer, with younger generations than that not getting their news so much from cable (maybe The Daily Show).
I don’t buy that they get their news from the Daily Show. Most of the jokes wouldn’t be funny if you didn’t know what was happening in the news. There must be something else, most likely websites or Yahoo News or something like that instead.
I get my political news from here, dailykos.com and WCPT progressive talk radio.
did you see that we’re losing the FM for WCPT?
Yeah, some Russian channel on 92.7 and 92.5 is pretty scratchy. Bummer! Do you have an alternative? I can get America Left on XM 127 where I used to listen to Thom Hartmann, Mike Malloy et cetera, but I’m not crazy about the guys who replaced them like Michaelangelo Signourelli. Plus, I’ll really miss Stephanie Miller.
Just a handful of channels but a whole sea of right wing blowhards on both FM and XM. That tells me how out of the mainstream of American thought you and I are.
It’s surprising in the Chicago market how many right wing stations are out there. I have Sirius too so I can get some good stuff there but it’s too bad we lost local radio
“did you see that we’re losing the FM for WCPT? “
Is there an AM station?
yeah, it’s 820 AM and I’m pretty sure they are going to continue to broadcast on that frequency
Changed my radio button. It’s a bit noisy (sounds like faint ignition noise) but I can hear. GM built these radios for XM then added FM as an afterthought, And AM probably for some obscure regulatory reason.
Muchas Gracias!
I think most of the jokes would, actually, because Stewart does usually provide the context. There is news as well as jokes.
They make new old people every day, and appeals to the worst in people are evergreen.
Yes, this.
No matter how many old people die off every year, there are always even more old people ready to take their place.
This isn’t all that surprising. When I worked for the ACLU, I was shocked to find out that our average member was age 64. (I don’t know if that was median or mean.) While people care about politics and policy their whole lives, they don’t actually get around to doing things like joining the ACLU or following political talk media regularly until their work years are winding down. Why not? Lack of money to join organizations (because they’re raising kids) and lack of time (because they’re working). When I expressed concern that our membership would die off unless we took action to bring in younger people, I was told that this is how it has always been, and we’ve never fallen off the cliff because people keep entering our target age range at roughly the same rate that they die. Same with Bill O, I would guess: If you want to see his potential audience in 10 years (assuming he lasts), look at the political beliefs of 55-65 year olds.
Yes, I am in that 55-65 age range. And from what I can tell, there is no shortage of people my age who have the same Fox News mindset that O’Reilly’s audience of today possesses. By and large, they are not watching Fox News. But you can bet your last dollar that their information sources right now are no better than those who are glued to Fox 24-7. And whatever comes along in the next 10-20 years to fill the void that might be left by any Fox News fading will, without a doubt, still appeal to the aggrieved white male. Most of us will be long dead when the demographic worm finally turns and this country can finally begin to wrest itself from the chains of this odious mentality which is demonstrated by the belief in the inherent supremacy of the American white male.
Probably will be replaced by a show catering to the aggrieved black male. There is nothing unique to whiteness. Unless you believe in racial differences in intelligence and/or morality.
yeah, that’s why I didn’t predict that his median would grow larger but simply observed that today’s median voter would. His median would probably grow though, just not by ten years.
Young people generally suck when it comes to giving a shit about the system, and I’d know, since I’m still kinda one of them.
When I worked as an election judge in Cincinnati back in the 2000s, I was the youngest election judge in Hamilton County, which is a fairly populous county. I was in my early 20s, and also a (literal) card-carrying member of the ACLU. Every election judge that I worked with during that period was 60+ and older. They loved that a young person was giving a shit, even if 2/3 of the election judges were Republicans.
I always try to get younger people involved in politics and elections, but the apathy that is encouraged by the oligarchs who own and operate this country is a very powerful force. I’ve still gotten and still do get people to go out and vote for the first time. I did it in Ohio, and now I do it down south. Ultimately, getting someone to vote once isn’t too difficult, but it is hard to get them to continue going to vote. Especially with the system stick in status quo mode.
And it is getting worse. With the ubiquity of cell phones that are mobile personal entertainment centers, it’s hard to get a young person to look up from their phone long enough to not get fucked over by the system. So a lot of young people who might otherwise care have been trained not to.
The only thing better for a Republican than getting a vote, is for Democrats to not get a vote. It’s how they win a whole lot of races they shouldn’t, and it sucks.
I’ll wager the cognitive dissonance is so advanced with the elderly O’Reillyites that they see nothing wrong with attacking the (already quite despised) Hillary based on age.
The O’Imbeciles also likely skew male and these old codgers can’t abide seeing powerful and consequential ladies from the start. Who does she think she is?! These are completely unreconstructed and entrenched male chauvinists, so of course Hillary is too old (and too female).
So Rove has little to fear about somehow alienating these turds. They can’t be alienated against the Right.
I know, right? How many times have I read something like this from people who should know better by now?
C’mon, Booman. Attacking Hillary’s age — attacking nearly anything about Hillary from the right — is an emotional appeal. Saying the strategy will fail because much of the base is in and around her age group is wishful thinking.
I know a 65 year-old who gives his 12 year-old grandson the latest Bill O’Reilly books.
Oh no…..child abuse!!
Jeebus, gifting the “free” (trash) books Gramps gets for contributing a hundred bucks to some Rightwing org fleecing the braindead. And what gives, no volumes of Boss Rushbo?! WTF?! Too “advanced”?
Most likely the grandson shit-cans the things the minute Gramps leaves the house. “Mom, why is Grampa so lame?”….
There ain’t no 12 year old readers of O’Reilly, Gramps. But give him the complete works, knock yourself out!
I don’t think that has anything to do with Hillary being too old to be president. Most of the people I know who were most worried about McCain’s age in 2008 were seniors who knew how tired and less sharp they were in their old age. Those were valid concerns with a Republican candidate and they are a valid concern with a Democratic candidate.
I may have to disagree with you on this one BooMan.
The older I get, the more I think stuff like “I’m 55, and I already don’t have the energy I used to, there’s no way someone who is 72 can have the energy it takes to be president”.