Breaking: News viewership goes down in August

This cold is just kicking my butt. All I want to do is sleep until about September when the cold and the stupid discourse ends. Take this "important" item, that I didn't actually read beyond the blurb below at Memeorandum.

The network newscast ratings for last week are in and “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” tied its all-time low in total viewers with an average of 4.89 million tuning in during the five days. — The low was set last June, when ABC also hit its own low.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that the last two weeks in August are the biggest summer vacation time. Similarly, June is the big start of vacation season for those who can't afford August hotel rates. And if I recall the lastest ratings I've seen for cable shows, this is still about 4 million more than Fox's most popular news programming.

Bizarre how people get so hung up on the numbers. They have nothing to do with reach. Their only use is to bamboozle advertisers into believing they're getting some value for often gerrymandered statistics. Yes, I'm talking to you internet sites that make me click through four pages and two pop-ups to get to the story I'm trying to read.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]