ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the audience for TV news has become increasingly skewed toward the elderly in recent decades. When politics is on, young people are off somewhere else, or are reaching for the remote control. Moreover, as with the findings regarding newspapers, data over time show that such generational differences were not always the case. Major political events were once shared national experiences. However, the current generation of young adults is the first to grow up in a media environment in which there are few such shared experiences. As channels have proliferated, it has become much easier to avoid exposure to politics altogether by simply grabbing the remote control. It has become particularly difficult for political programming on television to get through to a generation who has channel surfed all their lives. A Pew Research Center survey from January 2004 casts further light on young adults’ relative lack of reliance on broadcast news programs.
