I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a
statement that I can't imagine generating any partisan criticism: C-SPAN is a national treasure.
For nearly half a century the cable TV service has televised our nation's political discourse
in a non-partisan, dispassionate, objective and transparent way. Often live, and available for replay on-demand.
And as a YouTube TV subscriber, I for one am pumped that all of C-SPAN's
channels have been added to the lineup, though using C-SPAN.org is a pretty great service too.
The funny thing is I never really thought about its audience composition -- until the other day
-- when they passed along a new study from Magid showing the "idealogical" composition of its viewers.
It shows that C-SPAN's audience falls remarkably evenly across the political ideological
spectrum. It literally spans American politics.
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The Magid research follows a Pew Research Center study released earlier this year showing much more pronounced ideological skews among the major
broadcast news outlets, and various other political news reporting outlets (see two graphics below).
What I'd like to see is a break on the time Americans across the ideological spectrum spent
watching C-SPAN vs. mainstream, biased and fringe news outlets, and I'm pretty sure that would reveal why American political discourse isn't as balanced as C-SPAN's audience is.
