In their zeal to hustle and intimidate the GOP into legalizing 11 million new Democrats, the mainstream media love to crow over their mistaken belief that demographics will eventually be the end of the Republican Party. But real numbers show that it is television news that should worry about demographics. A new Pew report shows that young people are fleeing television news in droves for what they see as more reliable news online:
Young people are watching much less TV news than they did a decade ago. In 2001, 72 percent of people aged 18 to 29 picked TV as one of their top two sources for news; in 2013, that number dropped to 55 percent. The Internet is now the main source of news for everyone under 50, and it’s not just Millennials driving traffic to the web. 2013 was the first time that 30- to 49-year-olds said that they got just as much news from the Internet as they did from TV.
A big part of the problem is trust.
In a 2012 Pew survey, only 45 percent of Millennials said they could believe stories aired on Fox News. 55 percent said they could believe stories on MSNBC, and 63 percent said they could believe stories on CNN. Also interesting: The older the audience, the less they seem to believe. Only 38 percent of people over 65 said they believed stories aired on MSNBC.
More here.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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