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Statistician Ryan Burge is known for his “Graphs about Religion,” but he charts other things too, and earlier this week he took a deep dive into who’s watching the news, and where.
According to Burge, when Fox News says, “America is watching,” it’s not hyperbole — and it’s not just older Americans tuning into Fox.
True, Fox remains king of the cable-news hill in large part because of its aging faithful. “About 55% of the Silent Generation and 44% of Boomers watch Fox News every single day,” Burge reports, analyzing data from the Cooperative Election Study.
Fox also has “absolute dominance” of almost every age group, and a healthy share of Gen Z. But in Burge’s report was an interesting nugget: Slightly more of Gen Z reported watching CNN than Fox News. This stood out, because CNN was slipping elsewhere demographically. (“Outside of the Latter-day Saints, CNN saw big losses across the entire religious spectrum,” Burge wrote.)
So what’s up with CNN and Gen Z?
Burge was reporting on the “whats,” not the “whys,” but he told me he thought about something when looking at the data:
“Both my kids watch CNN nearly every day. At school. It’s called ‘CNN 10,’ and it’s a 10-minute little news segment they get piped into the classroom. So maybe that’s part of the reason that CNN does well with young people?”
I wasn’t familiar with “CNN 10,” but there it was on YouTube, narrated by a winsome anchor, former NFL player Coy Wire. My youngest daughter, who just graduated from college, knew it well.
“Hey, it’s the same guy!” she said when I showed her a clip. Turns out, she had watched the 10-minute news show every week in a social-studies class without ever mentioning it.
“CNN 10″ started in 2017, replacing an earlier iteration called “CNN Student News” that was aimed at high school and middle school students. The show seems a bit of a throwback to the days when partisan politics didn’t infect everything, but it has not been bereft of controversy. An internet search reveals various objections to the content over the years, and also some fond remembrances of it.
The most recent shows seem to work very hard to avoid politics, while offering a smorgasbord of current events.
Tuesday’s show, for example, featured reporting on the history of the Eiffel Tower, the KitKat theft, an inner-city horseback riding program, a trapped whale in the Baltic and efforts to replace plastic with an alternative derived from seaweed. No mention was made of the biggest story in the world right now: the military action in Iran.
There’s something sweet and wholesome about Coy Wire giving shoutouts to various schools across the U.S. as he signs off, like the one he gave Tuesday to Mr. Powers, retiring after 45 years at Manistique Middle School in Michigan.
Still, it’s kind of amazing that this broadcast hasn’t been stopped via executive order, given the president’s frequent denouncement of CNN as “fake news” and the rising levels of distrust in media overall. Its very existence harkens back to a less polarized age when Americans were newly enamored by the idea of having news offered to them 24-7 — a time that happened to be a time of war.
When CNN first launched, people were skeptical about whether there was enough news to broadcast 24 hours. As former CNN editor Randy Harber wrote in a remembrance of the network’s early days, the skepticism was reflected in a New Yorker cartoon that showed a dead bird being photographed by a CNN cameraman. The caption was, “A sparrow falls, and CNN goes live.”
But, Harber wrote, “A breakthrough moment came with the start of the Persian Gulf War. That war produced something called ‘CNN Syndrome.’ As video of bombs falling on targets and reports from the field streamed in, people were reluctant to be away from their televisions.”
Today, of course, CNN is but one offering in a vast landscape of 24-7 news sources, and it will be interesting to see if “CNN 10″ will survive its parent company’s proposed merger with Paramount Skydance.
That said, surely few Americans would endorse Fox or MS Now broadcasting in public schools, and if CNN doesn’t do it, who would? (Don’t answer that, Bari Weiss.)
‘Vice signaling’ is here
In The Atlantic this week, Tom Nichols offers a term we have long needed in the American lexicon: vice signaling.
It’s a play on the term “virtue signaling,” of course, and Nichols — no fan of the Trump administration — applies it to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, calling vice signaling a form of “peacocking, with uglier feathers.”
In that way, it is the perfect term to describe the rampant use of profanity in the public square, which also seems a sort of preening coupled with contempt for the moral standards of others.
Recommended Reading
Valerie Hudson has been following the legal peril facing social-media companies and sees recent verdicts in New Mexico and Los Angeles as a warning for other kinds of companies.
“The moment of reckoning has arrived, at long last. And what these companies must realize is that Americans have not one iota of sympathy for them. They have to assume that any cases that go to a jury trial will be decided against them. Every single one of us has seen the harm up close and personal in our own families.”
The reckoning that came for social media will come for AI and prediction markets, too
BYU Law School student Alex Hansen writes of his discovery that fraternal bonds forged in shared spaces — such as a baseball stadium — can overcome political differences.
“Baseball doesn’t solve our problems. Going to church doesn’t erase disagreement. But when we show up in stadiums, in holy places and in community centers and choose to stand next to people instead of shouting at them online, something shifts. Seeing each other’s faces and learning others’ stories makes it harder to reduce someone to a stereotype.”
The connecting capacity of shared spaces — inning by inning, pew by pew
Well-meaning actions that aim to correct wrongs of the past can create problems for the future, especially when money is involved, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes.
“Adults will always have the loudest voices. The people standing before us with concrete demands — including ones that require compensation for real harms — are always going to get more of our attention than the problems of some future generation. But the chickens are coming home to roost. Our leaders have bowed to public pressure and made terrible financial decisions, kicking the can down the road."
The chickens are coming home to roost when it comes to public policy
Tweet of the Week
Many of the “technological advances” we see online amount to videos of cats playing instruments and preparing food. But this tweet represents real progress and is wonderful news.
Runner-up: This amazing footage of a pair of bald eagles tending to their just-hatched eaglets:
End Notes
If you missed it, here’s my article on the conundrum that colleges and universities are facing as commencement ceremonies loom:
As commencement looms, can Gen Z be trusted with a microphone?
Fun fact: When searching for this link, I typed “Can Gen Z be trusted with a microphone” into Google’s search engine, and its AI answered me:
“Yes, Gen Z can be trusted with a microphone, as they are redefining communication with authentic, unfiltered, and tech-savvy storytelling that often resonates widely.”
No bias there, none whatsoever.
In other news, in last week’s poll, we asked Right to the Point readers if their travel plans have changed because of current events. Not so much, for most of us:
And finally, in the Department of How Did I Live So Long Without Knowing This, I learned recently that pretzels have religious significance, thanks to Alexandra Greeley’s article “Why Pretzels are Synonymous With Lent.”
In fact, in some European households, Greeley writes, pretzels are only served during Lent, which, in Catholic churches, officially ends Thursday evening, but in other observances, extends through Saturday night (or a week from Saturday night, for Orthodox Christians). Happy Easter to all who celebrate.