Audience Profiles: Who Actually Reads The New York Times, Watches Fox News, And Other News Publications And Channels?

It's well-known that young people flock to "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." But they also love the New York Times, according to data from a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2012.

While 18-29-year-olds comprise only 23 percent of the population, they formed 43 percent of Colbert’s audience, 30 percent of Stewart’s audience and 32 percent of the New York Times’ readers.

For conservative political talk shows, like "Hannity" and "The O'Reilly Factor," audiences were much older -- 66 percent were over 50. The same was true of liberal talk shows, but to a lesser degree. Some 59 percent of those who watch "Hardball" were 50 or older, as was 57 percent of "The Rachel Maddow Show" audience.

Men were more avid consumers of financial publications like The Economist, while women made up a large portion of the audience for daytime talk shows like "The View" or "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." MSNBC's audience skewed more female , while the audiences for CNN and Fox News were more evenly divided between the genders.

The Economist, NPR and The New Yorker had largely affluent audiences, with more than 40 percent of their audiences making more than $75,000/year.

Despite its reputation as a conservative-leaning publication, the Wall Street Journal had a much larger proportion of readers that identified as “Democrat” and “Independent”, as opposed to “Republican.” The publication's audience also included a slightly larger proportion of readers that identified as “liberal” vs. “conservative.”

A majority of U.S. residents -- 64 percent -- said that they preferred to get political news from sources that have no particular political view, according to the Pew report. Only 26 percent preferred news from a source that agreed with their own political views.

Here's a series of charts with the results of the survey: