Media

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, with me today is one of my colleagues in my office, Mr. Christian Amy.

Mr. President, I want to talk for a few minutes about America, about Washington, DC, and about Louisiana.

Every time I leave Washington, DC, and go back home to America, I am reminded of how parochial Washington, DC, can be, how removed it can be, how unaware it can be. We often hear people in the city where our Capitol sits say: Well, the American people just don't understand. The American people--you often hear--just don't know what they are talking about. They don't know what we know. They don't read the news. They don't keep up like we do.

So, recently, I conducted a poll to test that point of view, and some were surprised with the results of the poll. I was not. One of the questions I asked in the poll of the people of Louisiana is, How frequently would you say they follow the news?

About 70 percent of my people in Louisiana follow the news every single day because--actually, it is 67.8 percent. Some of my colleagues back home were surprised by that. I was not; 23.5 percent said a few times a week; and only 6.4 percent of my people don't consult the news or read the news very often.

I also, out of curiosity, tested a poll where my people were receiving their news: 39 percent of the people of Louisiana--70 percent of whom follow the news every single day--get their news from cable TV. Another 21.1 percent get their news from morning and evening broadcast television, not cable--local television news and national television news.

So, I guess, from one point of view--and I think the numbers bear this out in Louisiana--in terms of the source of news, television is king. Television is king.

Seventy percent--or, rather, sixty percent of my people, most of whom follow the news every single day, get their news either from cable TV, from the national evening and morning news, and from local television evening and morning news.

Twenty-seven percent of my people get their news primarily from the internet. To break that down, it is about 12.6 percent from social media apps--Facebook, Twitter; 4.7--almost 5 percent--from YouTube; and another 9.1 percent from Apple News, Google News, and those sorts of sites on the internet.

So television news for both national and, particularly, local is king in Louisiana, with 60 percent of the people saying that is my go-to news source, but the internet is also a substantial factor at 27 percent: 27 percent of my people--70 percent of whom read the news every day--get their news from the internet.

Radio news is also important in my State. Seven percent of my people and change listen to radio news as their primary source of news. Coming in last--consistent with national trends--only 4 percent of my people receive their news today from newspapers. My, how the world has changed.

I just found these numbers to be interesting. The source of news for most of my people was interesting to me, but I was very, very pleased to find that 70 percent of my people in Louisiana read the news every single day, and in most cases, they get it from television but also the internet and radio as well.

Sometimes we get along in Washington in terms of our perceptions of what is going on in the real America.

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