The leader of the free world (Obama) has allegedly stopped smoking!

Repeatedly wrote:

60 Minutes is the place where the left goes to reveal their secrets partially and dramatically, with approval, and the place that skewers the right with ambush interviews and selective editing to make them appear evil. I am quite familiar with the program and its PR role in picking winners and losers according to its biases.

Kinda like that recent love fest over GWB? Or maybe their unequivocal supporting piece of the wmd lies before the invasion of Iraq? Yeah, their liberal shills alright. Dumbass.

Repeatedly wrote:

Fox has attracted more viewers than some cable networks, but on a typical day, for a typical program, it has approximately 2 million viewers, and approximately 306 million Americans not watching.

According to Neilsen, the average American watches approximately 4 hours of television each day. If FOX has 2M viewers watching at any given time, this equates to a total of 12M FOX viewers per day. Excluding children, dementia patients, illiterates, and others for whom 'news' is not meaningful leaves approximately 30M. Thus, FOX is the primary news source for about 40% of the country.

Your notion that Fox viewership should be measured by how many view per day, rather than per program is a good one. It's a more valid comparison than my original number.

So, using your number, 12 million people watch Fox sometime in a typical day, 296 milion people don't.

Your segmenting of 30 million people away from the 308 million Americans, leaving 278 million uncounted is not useful for any purpose except to make your percentage appear larger.

12 million is 3.9% of 308 million.

Today is another day where a network that 3.9% of Americans watch in a typical day drives media controlling leftists crazy.

When did Obama become the leader of the free world. I sure as hell ain't following him.

You don't have a choice. He is your god now.

Repeatedly wrote:

Your segmenting of 30 million people away from the 308 million Americans, leaving 278 million uncounted is not useful for any purpose except to make your percentage appear larger.

Your argument is statistically incorrect and illogical. Since your premise is based on available media, it must also take into account those who do not take advantage of the available media. Though there are over 300M people in the country, tens of millions are not availing themselves of any of these media sources. If you wish to argue the influence of the media, your argument must only incorporate those peoples directly exposed to said media. Re-read my post above for a solid statistical argument with real numbers.

Mr./Ms. Statistics,

You are obviously a bright person, so I will try once more.

Your explanation justifies and explains your assumptions pretty well, but misses my point somewhat.

Fox is a dissenting point of view. Using your numbers, 12 million people see it at some point in the day. 296 million people don't. That dissenting point of view is a counterpoint to decades of left leaning media bias, a bias which is well disseminated throughout society, without people having to turn to the media on any given day to acquire it. It's a bias that permeates U.S. education, workplaces, and movies, etc.

If the left biased media hadn't been so predominant for decades, your percentage calculation would have more validity. By analogy, think of a soaking rain in a field for a month. Then, on the first day of the new month, forty percent of the rain that comes down is captured in a container. The measure of the water in the field is most certainly not just the sixty percent the container did not capture on that day. The measure of what is in the container is just a small part of the whole.

Fox News is an affront to those who see a version of the news with a liberal slant made popular by a couple of decades of orthodoxy on the affairs of the day. Some now greedily call that slanted reporting "history," trying to enshrine a point of view as immutable truth.

Fortunately, that will be sorted out over time. Fox irritates the left, but more telling is the presence of dissenting views on the internet. A generation of curious young people now have regular exposure to alternative points of view, beyond that fed to them in school, or by those around them, or through the news media. I think that Fox is a small part of the sea change that is coming, made possible once people find out that the complained of "bias," now alleged against Fox News is just a different one, and a new one, with a much larger and longstanding bias of the left that was designed to permeate the dissemination of news, education, and entertainment.

Oh, for what it's worth, I watched Fox News Channel for less than an hour total in 2010. With the internet, the evening news is a slow and delayed review of what I already learned earlier in the day. I watch MSNBC programs such as Olbermann and Maddow for their point of view about once per week, as sometimes, they are very enlightening. They have a bias, but they can be very good in reporting on things others ignore.

Thanks again for your contribution of substituting daily viewing totals for program ones. It's a very valid and basic point that I missed initially.

Repeatedly wrote:

So, using your number, 12 million people watch Fox sometime in a typical day, 296 milion people don't.

Are you insane or just really, really, REALLY stupid??

You are counting children in your estimate of what % of the population is getting its news from Fox??? Oh.... my..... god.

1/4 of the population is under 18. a very small fraction of this group even read or watch the news in any form. There's 75 million people you can subtract from your estimate right there. There's another 5-8% of the population that are so old and incapacitated, that they likely don't read or watch news. That's another 15-20 million people. We are now getting close to 100 million to take out of your totals. Out of the remaining 200 million consenting, barely brain-functioning adults, what % would you guess are either so poor, or on drugs, or in prison, or don't give a rats ass about the news that they either don't or can't read/watch news? 1/4 to 1/2 ? We now have about 120 million remaining barely brain-functioning adults who actually absorb some form of news on a regular basis

So....... drum roll please..... possibly 5-10% of that group gets some of their "news" from Fox. And many many more of them get their "news" from right wing blogs, or talk radio, or "news"papers like the NYpost or Boston Herald or any number of right wing papers. So a VERY SIGNIFICANT portion of the adults who watch or read news in this country get their "news" from right wing sources like Fox or other groups.

So spare me your complete nonsense that it is something like .05% of americans who get their news from fox, and 99.5% reads/watches liberal news organizations.

(you were truly counting infants and toddlers in your #'s !!?!? wow, just wow)

It's a simple number, separating out no one other than his calculation of how many watch Fox News.

You sure have a lot of a lot of histrionics and emotion when you make an obvious point. I guess that comes with your territory of being a person who thinks he is the only one who knows that people who don't watch Fox News include infants and toddlers.

Quick tip: your deciding that people who disagree with you are idiots is interfering with your objectivity.

I also find your notion that America has "120 million barely brain functioning adults" to be really abhorrent. Your words read just like the contempt that many on the left have for the ordinary person.

LOL politics...

and that is all I have to contribute... :)

Repeatedly wrote:

By analogy, think of a soaking rain in a field for a month. Then, on the first day of the new month, forty percent of the rain that comes down is captured in a container. The measure of the water in the field is most certainly not just the sixty percent the container did not capture on that day. The measure of what is in the container is just a small part of the whole.

So the soaking rain is FOX news? That means that the 12 million daily viewers (a.k.a. the amount captured in the container) is really an under-representation of the actual amount of folks exposed to FOX news.

How does this help your argument?

It helps it fine when you recognize that the rain is the analog to the distribution of news and the container is the amount on Fox. It's 40% of the whole of the new rain, which is your percentage, the best clue of all.

My point is that you failed to calculate the torrent of prior rain (analogous to decades of unchallenged left biased media), so your 40% number is necessarily wrong as to the oversoaked field (analogous to the long indoctrinated population).

I am not a statistician, but I can certainly recognize when your percentage is artificially high because you are using the incorrect whole.

The only reason I made the analogy is that you were the one saying I was missing something and I wanted to make it plainer to you that you were missing something, without being insulting, as many are on here. Typing is a sometimes inefficient way to have a discussion. If we did this in person, we'd only take a minute or two to understand each other and see where we disagreed. This takes a lot longer.

I'm curious to your assertion that there have been "decades of unchallenged left biased media." I wish to challenge this. Can you provide unbiased evidence to support this assertion? Thanks.

What is this "leader of the free world" crap that we always get from the US?

#1 - Almost every country is "free" these days - not just the US. And in fact, the US isn't very free these days - especially if you happen to be a Muslim living there.

#2 - Obama is not my leader or the leader of anyone else in the world except those from the US.

The U.S. is the dominant nation in the world. As the U.S. goes, so goes the rest of the world. Obama's in charge, like it or not.

Barack realized that he did not want to wind up with lung cancer, trying to justify his need for treatment to some death panel in another 25 years. Barack is no dummy.