(no subject)

[barking_iguana]

This, is half the reason why McCain will lose. In states that experienced rioting in the 1960s, bigscary is right that the impact of racist Democrats will counteract non-fanatic cultural conservatives' distaste for and distrust of McCain. But that distaste is there, apart from any particular political issues.

In regions that are still recovering from pogroms, be they anti-Black (the South) or anti-White (Northeast and Los Angeles), too many Whites will too readily see Obama as OTHER to identify with his family. But to those who value stable families outside those regions, it is McCain who is more clearly not like them. Obama is not an egghead; he is not a Brahmin. He is someone they can understand, even if they criticize his mother for shacking up with a flighty foreigner.

McCain is someone they can understand, too. He's the uncle who combines a military pension and some murky business dealings to live a playboy life and is barely tolerated at family reunions, so long as he stays sober around the kids. And now that he's going senile, he expects to be President?

Comments

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

The family narrative you gave is an excellent one, but is not prevailing. The prevailing narrative is of McCain as the avuncular, barbecuing granddad who shoots straight and has Seen Things, and of Obama as an untested, arugula-eating yuppie with unclear loyalties.

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

That’s why fewer and fewer people pay any attention to the Big Media.

Though Joe Klein has now taken to using words such as ‘scum’ and, just the other day, ‘severe character defect’ when talking about John McCain, which is amazing, considering all the years of effort that McCain has put into making the Media Stars love him. It was not too long ago that Klein went on the record with the ludicrous prediction that John McCain would run an ‘honorable’ campaign (or some such words).

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Repeat after me: Blogs are not killing big media. Big media is subverting blogs.

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

Do you know what a zombie system is? That’s when the media narrative succeeds in getting innocent victims to repeat the media narrative by convincing them it is their narrative.


http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2007/narrative_networktv_audience.asp?cat=2&media=5

In 2006, three trends stood out regarding the audience for network news:
There was yet another decline in the total number of evening news viewers. While NBC’s evening newscast lost viewers, ABC’s audience size remained the same. At CBS, the audience for the evening newscast over all remained the same even though Katie Couric’s debut in September produced a dramatic surge. By the end of the year the CBS Evening News audience had shrunk roughly 26% from that momentary peak.
In the race for the top spot in the evening, there were no changes in rankings, but ABC, with a new anchor and focus, may be closing the gap with NBC.
After a year of departures and new faces in the anchor chair, morning news lost viewers, and its total audience size was at its smallest level of this decade.

Nightly Newscasts

Despite new anchors, promotional campaigns and press attention, the audience for the evening network news programs continued to shrink in 2006.

The total evening network news audience now stands at around 26 million, down about a million from the year before. It has now dropped by about 1 million a year for the last 25 years.

Ratings, which count the number of television sets in the U.S. tuned to a given program, declined almost 4% between November 2005 and November 2006, falling to 18.2, down from 18.9 in November 2005, according to data from Nielsen Media Research.1 That is about the same pace as in recent years.2

Meanwhile, share — the percentage of just those sets in use at a given time that are tuned to a program — declined more, 8%, to 34 in November 2006, from 37 the same time in 2005. Now, only about a third of the TV sets in use at the dinner hour are tuned to the network news.

There may be some audiences left out of Nielsen’s methodology, however. For example, ratings may fail to capture television sets in bars, restaurants, college dormitories, military barracks, nursing homes, prisons, and other institutions.



At the original site there is a graph of the almost linear decline in viewership since 1980.

Similar data for cable news show it plateauing at its already not very popular levels, and by far the largest segment remains Faux ‘News’ viewers, who mostly are hopeless, anyway.

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

You know, watching TV, reading polls, and stuff like that, that’s how Hamlet got the way he was, and it’s how he died at the scene of a scandal rather than become a great king.