Religious Right Botches Cut and Paste

Steve Benen has an amusing example of the dangers of relying on cut and paste. He notes that some right wing websites will use cut and paste to automatically change every mention of the Democratic Party to Democrat Party. The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow websitea utomatically changes gay to homosexual. Until they caught the error, a story that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials became rather amusing after going through this automatic edit:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999. […]

Homosexual didn’t get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal, but by the halfway mark he had established a comfortable lead. He slowed somewhat over the final 10 meters-nothing like the way-too-soon complete shutdown that almost cost him Saturday. Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: “A little fatigued.”

Television Viewers Aging

Television advertisers generally seek a young audience, and at times television networks have even canceled shows which have decent ratings if the viewership is older than they desire. They might have to rethink their long term plans. Variety reports that the median age for watching live television is 50. If DVR’s are included, this only drops the age by one year.

Most likely this is largely because younger viewers are no less tied to the networks when they watch television, and they use other media more often. This would include watching television shows on line as opposed to on television.

I wonder if this will force the networks to reconsider who their shows are aimed at. Will they continue to go after the young audience, which is paying less attention but who the advertisers want, or will they concentrate more on the types of people who are actually more likely to watch a network show?

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