Has the Mainstream Run Dry?

摘要

Americans under 50, as the cliche goes, were raised by the mass media. And this fall, as grown children sometimes do, some of them began to neglect their mother. On the major broadcast TV networks, ratings among viewers 18 to 49 years old (the group most closely watched by advertisers) were down 8%. The drop-off was even worse among men under 35, the couch potatoes of the future. The rejection was almost poignant. You don't call? You don't write? It would kill you to pick up a remote? The networks? which stood to lose hundreds of millions of ad dollars-blamed the Nielsen rating service. Advertisers blamed the programming. But the real blame belongs to a historical force more powerful than a Nielsen box, more pernicious than a stack of bad Coupling scripts and not limited to TV: the end―or at least the extreme makeover―of the mass-media audience as we have known it.