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May 20, 2008

Appalachia Media of Choice Revisited

A friend and blog reader was kind enough to send me a link to updated cable TV penetration information by state, which was a nice way of saying that my hunch about cable penetration in West Virginia was wrong.

So in a very rare spurt of humility, I looked at the numbers to see what the facts were and compared cable penetration in West Virginia to that in Kentucky and Oregon, where there are primaries today (Tuesday, May 20), because Kentucky is projected to give Hillary Clinton approximately as big a margin of victory as West Virginia did and Oregon is projected to go big for Obama. I wanted to see if I could draw any inferences from these comparisons. Here’s what I found:



		  Average  Average EBI  Average Market

		  Wired    Index        Rank

West Virginia     67.09       71        147

Kentucky          57.9        83.5       56

Oregon            58.4        86.8      119

The EBI Index is the household effective buying income in a state compared to the average of the US household EBI, which would be 100 percent. Thus, an EBI Index of 71 is 39 percentage points below the national average.

What these numbers show in that the five DMA (designated market areas) in the Appalachian state of West Virginia, contrary to my assumption, have a relatively high wired cable penetration, which does not include satellite TV penetration, which tends to be higher in rural areas. Of course, what these numbers do not show is the household penetration of high-speed Internet access, but it would be safe to assume that it would be concomitantly higher in the five West Virginia DMAs that the two DMAs in Kentucky and the four DMAs in Oregon.

So if cable penetration and broadband Internet access is relatively high in West Virginia, what would account for voters’ choice as compared to Oregon? It could be income, which is significantly higher in Oregon, but then Kentucky, a Clinton state, is not significantly different, so income alone can’t be the difference. Nor can race, since all three states have a much higher white population than black.

Perhaps, as I suggest in my previous blog, it has to do with media choice. Perhaps, as I suggest in my previous blog, it has to do with anxiety about change and degree of acceptance of new ideas. I suspect it as a little to do with both, but my suspicions, or hunches, have been wrong in the past. What do you think?

Posted by Charles Warner at May 20, 2008 01:22 PM

Comments

somalley [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 21, 2008 01:09 PM writes:

I wonder if the EBI takes into account women earning 77-cents on the dollar?
http://www.cluw.org/programs-payequity.html
Experience suggests to me that Oregon has a greater proportion of women making above 77-cents on the dollar, and that Kentucky may have more women earning below 77-cents on the dollar.

Then again, I could be wrong. Media statistics can't explain everything.

And there is the outrageous proposition that people in Kentucky actually think Hillary Clinton would make a good president.


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