From Falon Fatemi at Forbes we learned in 2022: “The shift from TV-style appointment viewing to streaming has been significant, especially for younger people. Over 50% of streaming viewers are under 35; viewers ages 60 and up said they spend only 14% of their entertainment time with streaming services, but those ages 15–29 said they spend 22% of their entertainment time with streaming.”

So ever fewer people are parked in front of fabled news and talk show hosts at the same time every night, the way they used to be. That likely contributes to a decline in those shows’ influence.

The viewership decline shows up in current Nielsen statistics:

It finally happened, at least according to a new metric Nielsen began using two years ago: linear TV now accounts for less than 50 percent of all TV usage. This probably isn’t a surprise unless you’re reading this on the couch while watching the NBC Nightly News. Between YouTube, TikTok, and streaming channels, people have a lot of ways to occupy their video-viewing time.

Wes Davis and Alex Cranz, “It’s official, people aren’t watching TV as much as they used to,” The Verge, August 15, 22023

Cable and broacast make up less than half of TV viewing.

From Emma Saunders at the BBC we learned in July that in Britain, “Less than half of Generation Z watch broadcast TV.” That’s 16 to 24-year-olds:

Just 48% of young adults tuned in during an average week last year, compared with 76% just five years before (2018), according to Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report.

They watched traditional TV for an average of 33 minutes each day, down 16% year-on-year.

It will come as no surprise to many that the age group spent three times as long each day (1hr 33min) watching video-sharing platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. (July 30, 2024)

Thus, some in media are now saying that traditional TV is past the point of no return.

The key shift, of course, is away from top-down, more corporate-directed media to bottom-up, more consumer-directed media. Anxiety over the shift is probably a key driver in current government attempts to get control over misinformation, at the very time when they have done so much to discredit themselves as sources of information.