TV Viewing Breaks Records: “Nielsen reports in today’s LA Times that the average American now watches more than 151 hours of TV a month. That’s about 5 hours a day and an all time high – up 3.6% from last year.”
(HT: Collide Magazine)
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Richard H. Clark (Co-Founder/Editor-in-Chief) has spent his entire life writing, reading, listening, and playing. He has a Bachelors in Theology from the Baptist College of Florida and has a Master of Arts in Theology and the Arts from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is fascinated with the extent to which popular culture influences real people. He and his wife currently live in Louisville, KY where he is the classroom technology manager at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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I absolutely do not believe this statistic.
The Danes last blog post..20081119.ChurchLies
I do.
Potentially (!) I could see the number hitting this if we counted people who run television all day, whether they’re watching it or not (which would count any time I go to a restaurant, since they almost invariably have five screens bombarding my dining experience—so would a one-hour lunch then count as five hours of viewing?).
The thing is: I just don’t know people who watch like this. I don’t think. Maybe (and I won’t rule this out) Southern California, with its so-called fast-paced lifestyle doesn’t have time for this kind of thing but more easy-paced parts of the country do, off-setting numbers that might be closer to six weekly.
Really, I’m just highly suspicious of Nielsen numbers because their control group is ridiculous and has no actual control. Say a household of five has a single television and it’s equipped and tracked by Nielsen. Say at 8:30 on Tuesday, a half-hour program is watched. How does Nielsen track that? As having five viewers, thus counting as 2.5 hours? Or simply as a half hour. Or when they say the Average American, do they instead mean the average American household? These things are just absolutely impossible to track. And how do they decide who gets tracked? Could I who watch no television get tracked? Do they skew their survey to more voracious viewers in order to better gauge the popularity of shows?
The Danes last blog post..20081119.ChurchLies
My wife just suggested that it may be the elderly who skew the averages so high, remarking anecdotally that her grandmother, who had nothing to do would just park in front of the television pretty much all day long, not necessarily glued to the set, but watching nonetheless.
The next and obvious question then is: are the elderly real Americans? Discuss.
The Danes last blog post..20081119.ChurchLies