My Dutch colleague Stan Veuger cables me from his home in Northwest D.C. to alert me to this fascinating article in the Washington Post.

The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago.
These television viewers are aging faster than the U.S. population, Nathanson points out. The median age in the U.S. was 37.2, according to the U.S. Census, a figure that increased 1.9 percent over a decade. So to put that in context of television viewing, he said TV audiences aged 5 percent faster than the average American.
The research shows a sharpening age divide in the entertainment industry that has traditional media scrambling and newcomers such as Vice and Netflix establishing their own online empires.

You can read the entire article here.

The only reason I mention Dr. Veuger is to give me an excuse to point you to Timothy P. Carney’s beautiful smackdown of him over the Ex-Im Bank, which you can — and definitely should — read here.

— Michael R. Strain is a resident scholar and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him on Twitter at twitter.com/MichaelRStrain.