It Doesn't Add Up

Several moons ago, I came across this story about how Americans watched much more TV than any other country. It seemed wrong to me, so I bookmarked it thinking I'd try to figure it out later. Here's the chart from the site.

Notice it's viewing hours/household/day in 2011.

Apparently, others wrote about it.

Today, I came across this chart through Wonkblog.

Now, this chart is for 2012 and is per person not household and the US still leads all countries, but not by such a high margin.

Digging a little deeper, I compared the figures for countries in both charts.

Country	OECD	Statista
United States	8.5	4.9
Italy	4.2	4.3
Canada	4.1	4.0
United Kingdom	4	4.0
Poland	4	4.1
Spain	4	4.1
Germany	3.5	3.7
France	3.4	3.8
Ireland	3.2	3.4
Australia	3.2	3.1
Sweden	2.6	2.7

What's very interesting to me, is that even though the OECD is by household and Statista is by person, the figures are almost exactly the same (except for the US). That would be true if all those countries had 1 person/household on average, but unfortunately, that's not the case. The Quartz article linked above cites a few figures. US - 2.57, Australia - 2.52, UK - 2,12, Sweden - 1.99.

My guess is that the OECD figures used the US by household figure and the other countries' by person figure.

I write this post to point out that we must maintain healthy skepticism about what is reported to us, and that there are many among us, who use this information without checking it. Many people like to point out as many flaws with America as possible, and this is one strategy they use.

More Info:

The WSJ reports that the time use survey showed in 2012 that US Americans watched 2:50/person/day (170 minutes), even lower than Statista said. I don't know Statista's methodology, but I would imagine it's more accurate for comparison, since I would guess it's methods are the same across countries. Perhaps they count TV through internet while the time use survey does not, for example.

Neilsen also has it's own estimates.