[wahern]

> 90 percent of Americans over age 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week — down 2 percent since 2009. (This does not include public media, which Pew covered in a separate fact sheet.)

Source: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/am-fm-radio-holds-strong-f...

[lostmsu]

Once a week vs once an hour gives us clear winner.

https://nypost.com/2017/11/08/americans-check-their-phones-8...

[kube-system]

Frequency of use doesn’t equate to importance.

Example: checking 100 phone notifications about spam email is probably less important to society than a radio alert about a tornado warning.

[lostmsu]

Good thing tornado warning is now a loud mobile phone alert.

I'd expect people mostly listen to radio because they are bored while driving, which has about as much "importance".

[kube-system]

There's something to be said about the utility of old analog systems during emergency situations -- which is part of the responsibility of the FCC to account for.

Dead phones and offline towers are not unheard of in disaster situations.

For example: https://twitter.com/CarmenScurato/status/910957644256546817

[wahern]

It didn't say once a week, it said 90% at least once a week. It could be that 89% listen for 4 hours every day. Likewise, 12 minutes for checking the phone was an average. It could be 1% of people staring at their phone every waking hour.

I doubt it's either of those things. We can't begin to make quantitative comparisons with those bare facts. I just thought we could make a very simple qualitative deduction--that terrestrial radio is far more popular than many people believe.