The Economist 'Pocket World in Figures 2006 has interesting statistics about various countries, their markets and the habits of their people. It comes as no surprise to find that the USA and Britain are pretty much alike as markets: they return similar figures for almost everything from time spent watching TV to adult literacy and from telephone lines to DVD and CD sales. Two statistics did seem odd though:

1) Mobiles (cellphones). The UK has 91,2 subscribers per 100 people. The USA has only 54,6 per 100 people.The USA is way down the list. Even Australia at 30th has 72,0 per 100. Incidentally , Luxembourg, Taiwan, HongKong and Italy all have more than 100/100. No doubt many subscribers have more than one phone: they may have one exclusively for personal use and another for general or business use. Does this reflect a limited use of such phones across the whole of the States because of e.g coverage limitations or is it not such a general practice for people in general to have one because of no perceived need or other social reason or is there some other reason for this apparent anomaly?

2)Daily newspapers: Britain's daily newspapers sell 314 copies per 100,000 population. America's sell 188 per 100,000 (Japan is top at 551 ). Does this reflect a greater dependence on TV as a source of news,comment and features or fewer local daily papers and, of course, few national dailies on account of the sheer size of the USA, or is it accounted for by some other factor(s) ?

I really can't speak to your first question, but, the short answer to your second question is, yes, TV is unfortunately the prime source of news for most Americans, and, while I have no figures to back this up, I think that more people get their national news from the 30 minute broadcast evening news than a full-time news network. Since the 30 minute network broadcast has commercials, the actual content time of these shows is less than 25 minutes. It is no wonder then than most Americans know very little about the news in any depth.