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> The average reader
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The "average reader" does not matter to a news publication: their average reader does, but it is not something they can measure very well, and it will necessarily be skewed because their readers are a self-selected subset of the population.
If there existed only one newspaper (and newspapers were compulsory), then you could infer some things about that newspaper's readers from a national study. The nationwide average reading level would be relevant. Then say that we droop the requirement that all citizen read a newspaper: do you think the average reading level of people that read the newspaper goes up or down? Then say we add a second newspaper, but it is a tabloid that focuses on celebrity news and gossip, it's got a full page dedicated to horoscopes and the crossword puzzle is replaced with a jumble: do you think if you took a representative sample of both papers' readers, you'd get the same average reading level?