ABSTRACT
This chapter shows, the audience for TV news has become increasingly skewed toward the elderly in recent decades. It discusses the story of how young people have come to tune out politics on TV, both in the United States and in most established democracies. Political conventions of the past thus provided a wide-open window into the workings of American party politics. As channels have proliferated, it has become much easier to avoid exposure to politics altogether by simply grabbing the remote control. Political scientist William Taubman experienced the constraints of cable news firsthand when he served as CNN's expert analyst during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in 1988. A content analysis of CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC programming confirms just how little substantive information is usually conveyed via cable news channels. The range of programming options in the narrowcasting era is so extensive that it allows one to keep one's viewing to a limited range of interests.
