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.
It didn't say once a week, it said 90% atleast 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.
Example: checking 100 phone notifications about spam email is probably less important to society than a radio alert about a tornado warning.