Perspective
According to the cable industry only 58.8% of US households had cable in December 2006. In that number not every cable system carries CNN. Even among those that carry CNN, it is in the second tier of choices, and not everyone is willing to pay for it. Even if they wanted to watch the debate last night, having it on a cable channel meant a large number of people couldn’t. Oh, broadband Internet access is even more limited, so even people who have access to cable, don’t all have access to a fast Internet connection.
Most polls are conducted by landline telephone. Fewer and fewer people every year have a landline telephone, so the percentage of the population that can participate in polls is declining.
Obviously the group most heavily impacted by these facts are the poor, and that number has been growing. Not even the 70¢ per hour minimum wage increase that took effect today is going to help the poor get connected.
7 comments
I, for example, do not get CNN. And I was unwilling to install that Turner add-on for Firefox: any component from a TV network that requires an .exe to install can’t be 100 percent well-intended.
It occurred to me that this affects people on the YouTube end as well: only people with computers, broadband connections, videocams or digital cameras with a video mode, a YouTube account (that last admittedly free), and the skills to create, edit and post a video could ask questions. That eliminated a lot of poor people and probably not a few senior citizens as well.
Was the YouTube sourcing of questions a bad idea? Well, it was better than having them contrived purely by pundits, but inevitably, “we the people” see only a small percentage of ourselves represented among the questioners due to technological and financial limitations.
i was pleasantly surprised on one thing: cnn did a better job choosing from the submitted questions than i expected them to.
what they didn’t do well, was advertise the youtube part of it sufficiently beforehand. i only found out about it in time to do something about the technological and financial barriers [had i wanted to] because i surf youtube incessantly [and it wasn’t really obvious there iether]. my parents found out about it when i called them up yesterday and told them i was inviting myself over to their place to commandeer their tv for two hours. you might not expect a couple of old fogeys to know about youtube first-hand, but my parents watch cnn on television almost as much as i surf the internet.
if cnn had been advertising their collaboration with youtube properly, half my family would have been calling me up or sending me e-mails, asking me if i were going to participate.
i’m considering submitting a question for the republican debate. 😈
It’s really annoying when a huge segment of the population is written off like this. There are people, like the Grumpy Forester, for example, who live in an area without broadband. Other people, even people who would probably connect, live in areas with cable.
I try not to get carried away with graphics, and rarely link to video, because there are a number of people who stop by who can only connect via dial-up.
It’s even more annoying than people discussing shows on HBO, a network that no one I know subscribes to, even where it is available.
If you exclude people, they aren’t likely to vote.
I have a friend without cable who gets CNN on her UHF channel 53 or something like that…..
That’s truly odd, Moi, unless she’s picking a microwave relay for a local cable provider because it is broadcast via satellite to the cable systems.
Great Italy pictures.
i’ve got an acquaintance who’s doing the same thing as moi’s friend.
I guess it could be a bad shield on the cable, because it would be broadcast on or around channel 50 on most systems and that’s a standard UHF channel assignment.