TV viewing is up (or not)
I love it when self-serving research is foisted upon the public as revelatory fact. Witness the case of Jack Wakshlag’s latest use of “new research” to hammer home the reality that cable TV is beating broadcast TV. As written in Tuesday’s MediaLife, the study shows the average person watched 30.7 hours of television a week in the second quarter ending June 19th — up a whopping ten percent!
“People are watching more television than ever before,” says Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner. He notes that while his analysis focuses on a comparison of viewing this year to 2001, the average amount of time people spend watching TV has steadily been increasing.“What’s happening is that the total amount of television viewing keeps going up, despite what other media types say or what people believe or what people tell you when you ask them in a survey.”
I’m sorry, folks, but this is a bit much. It’s one of those “everybody else is wrong,” self-deceptive acts of an emperor with no clothes. And the worst part is that anything in this day and age that encourages television to stay in their rut is highly destructive.
Let’s all remember Bob Papper’s great line: “Television didn’t kill magazines by taking their readers; it killed magazines by taking their advertising.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 8:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
