Fox News and Gerontology

This morning, while I was looking over my news feeds I saw a headline in the NYT which caused me to take a step back and reflect.  I didn't read the article, but evidently advertisers have a need to be concerned about buying time on Fox News because the median (average) age of viewers is 65.  To give you an idea of what that 65 actually means, for every 24 year old viewer, you would need to have 2 viewers who were 85.  This is not good, since the advertising on Fox is geared for the 24 - 29 year age group.  What should be even more troubling for the news network is that the message they are sending out over the airwaves is not attracting younger viewers.

Fox News, past it's prime?

Being the news network watching by aging Americans does not put you in a 'win-win' situation.  In fact, it's quite the opposite since your audience is slowly dying off.  Part of the problem is the notion that 'if it's not broke, don't fix it' seems to have fixated itself in the executive pudding heads.  People aren't going to turn on a network simply to watch some porcelain doll reading a news prompter... well, maybe the old farts will.  What they need to do is turn their message into something which is more progressive and less regressive, a challenge they may find too difficult to achieve.  I mean, there's nothing wrong with being a geriatric news network, you just need to realize your audience is going to continue shrinking, year after year.  This means Fox News is in for a slow and lingering death.