Fantastique wrote:
It's the only conservative news network because conservatism sucks. Nobody wants to hear it.
Yet the Fox News ratings are pretty good, despite no one wanting to hear the message. Furthermore, Conservative Talk Radio does better than Liberal Talk Radio (which isn't always listened to via the airwaves but can be streamed on the internet as well, which should silence criticisms that Conservatives are behind the times).
Quote:
It has good ratings because of sensationalism. Only the uneducated can get caught in that trap. Also, retards can't read the newspaper or use a computer.
Again with the name calling. Aren't you getting tired of it, yet? I know I am. The fact is your very post is laden with misinformation (saying no one wants to hear conservative talk when the ratings clearly state otherwise) and that you're exaggerating and misrepresenting people (without any factual basis by saying conservatives can't use computers or read news papers) simply shows that you're a sensationalist, too. (MSNBC is just as sensationalist but their ratings aren't as well... so I'd think if we take the sensationalism out of both stations we're only left with the message. MSNBC Ratings still suck.)
I know plenty of conservatives that can use computers and I'm sure many liberals can't (consider the under-educated and poor in urban areas), so I'm going to chalk that point up to you talking out your ass.
I tried looking into readership of news papers and I found it would be difficult to compile any information on my own. I could look at subscriptions to larger publications (like the NYT) but I felt the information may have been bias since a majority of the urban publications would reflect a disproportionate number of readers between their conservative counterparts, just because urban areas are often times more liberal than they are conservative and sometimes you don't really have a better alternative. (My mother-in-law gets the Washington Post and she's a Republican.)
The only thing I could do was see if you were right in that conservatives don't read. To analyze this, I figured I could look at the number of clearly biased publications that made it to the NYT Best Seller list for Adult Non-fiction since the year 2000. Since there were dozens of books on the list each week, I decided I would only count books that made it to first place. (Books like Ron Paul's
Liberty Defined wasn't included in the list because it never made the number one spot, although I'm sure it has a right-lean to it.) To gather the data I went through the NYT List and wrote down the name of each author and their book if either the author or the book has a clear political bias; Micheal Moore, Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Glenn Beck, etc. I tracked how long each book was in the number one position and how many weeks they were on the list. I used
http://nytbestsellerlist.com to look up a lot of the 'Weeks on List' values until the year 2010, since sifting through all the lists manually would've been too time consuming. For the books that I couldn't find in that database, I manually went through the list and tallied the appearances. I'm not sure which parameters nytbestsellerlist.com used for being 'on the list' (Top 5, 10, 16 or 30) so when I manually went through, I picked the top 16 (since the NYT Best Seller List highlights those). Granted, I don't read a bajillion books and I don't know all the political pundits on both sides, so there may have been an exclusion or two -- although I'm pretty confident in these numbers.
I found that there were 24 right-leaning books and 11 left-leaning books, where a majority of the right leaning books were released after the election of Obama. Total numbers show the right-leaning books have 91 weeks in #1 while left-leaning books had 61 weeks in #1. Total weeks on the NYT list for right-leaning books was at 311 and 260 for those likely to lean left.
Does this mean conservatives read more than liberals? Absolutely not! I think this just gives a good indication that conservatives aren't too stupid to read a news paper since they are capable of reading non-fiction novels.
Edited: Added screen cap of spreadsheet.
