IF O'REILLY STAYS ON THE AIR, FOX'S MAIN ADVERTISERS WILL BE SELLING WALKERS AND INCONTINENT BRIEFS

The mailman delivered me at least a pound of junk mail today. We have a friendly relationship and I asked him-- for the 30th time-- if he couldn't just throw the stuff away. He started on about how they get in big trouble when they do that and how some people love the junk mail. Who, I wanted to know. "Well, some of the senior citizens like getting it," he explained. That made me feel guilty.

And just minutes later I got an e-mail from my friend Cenk tipping me off to a NY TIMES article that explains that there is even more junk communication that the elderly seem to like: Bill O'Reilly's silly cable show. So that's who likes all those annoying ad mailers that come everyday! The same people who can tolerate Bill O'Reilly! OK, now it's starting to fall into place. Even though advertisers prefer an average audience of 25-- an age when people are making life-long decisions and choices about consuming-- O'Reilly's simple-minded, angry hysterics have managed to draw an audience whose average age is 71. His audience was born during the Great Depression! When the average O'Reilly viewer was born, the country had just elected FDR to rescue the country from the kinds of Republican excesses that we haven't seen again... until now. Maybe some of the non-average viewers-- you know, the really old-timers-- were flappers and bootleggers.


The only non-senior citizen I ever met who was an O'Reilly viewer is the DWT Art Director, Adam, who claims he was only watching it so he could laugh at it because he says laughing is good for digestion. OMG! Maybe that's why the senior citizens watch it too! I mean... better than Metamucil? And as Cenk pointed out, "it's hard to argue that O'Reilly's views are going to shape where this country is going in the future." And his viewers are passing away.