"We now have — here’s a fact from Morris Fiorina, Stanford political scientist: More people own ferrets than watch Fox News.”Can that be true? Do more people own ferrets than watch Fox news?
Awakened from my slumbers,
I wondered about the numbers.
Ferrets are estimated to reside in 505,000 American households.
Of course, that's households. How many owners in a household? The average American household size is 2.59. Is that also true for ferret-owning households? Anyway, assuming every man, woman, and child in the house is an "owner", this gives us an estimate of about 1,313,000 ferret owners.
Onto Fox news. For February 24, Nielsen lists them as having 1,360,000 viewers over aged 12.
It's close, but it looks like Fox news technically wins.
I hate to say it, Mr. Brooks,
but give that data a second look.
UPDATE: Speaking of second looks, that Nielsen number I quoted isn't actually a peak viewers number. The same page lists O'Reilly's evening show as pulling in 3 million people. That's easily twice the ferret-owner count.
UPDATE 2: The blogger known as General Patterico has tracked down the source Brooks cited, and it turns out Brooks has mis-remembered what was being said in the first place.
6 comments:
The proper comparison isn't to the peak viewership at any moment on a particular day, but to the total number of people who routinely watch Fox News. Since some of those don't usually watch Beck (say, people who only watch TV in the middle of the night), and some of those people vary from their routine on any given day, the number will be significantly greater than Beck's viewership on a given day.
Also, your figure for ferrets had no minimum age, but the Nielsen figure did.
Alexander, you're quite right about the minimum age issue.
As for the peak viewership issue, I certainly see your point. Of course, part of the problem is that ferret ownership is a 24/7 kind of thing, but Fox News viewership is not.
I think when we speak of a "Fox News viewer," we generally mean a person who regularly watches the channel, not someone who happens to be watching it at the moment. It's a disposition that a person acquires and retains on an ongoing basis. Thus a viewer is a viewer, 24/7, even though he doesn't actually watch 24/7 -- much as a ferret owner owns his pet even when he's not paying attention to it.
That's a very reasonable approach, and I shall provisionally adopt it as my own.
Tempest in a teacup but I love the thought going into the analysis.
The remark was no doubt made to inject humor into the debate and highlight the relatively low numbers of people that watch very biased news coverage. Personally I'd rather stare at a blank screen than watch Fox news propaganda.
It was a memorable quote though and days after the debate had me thinking of looking up numbers.
I think Fox news should get a sister station named Ferret news.
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