C tells us that the time people spend reading books (irrelevant) and newspapers has increased. But we know that the population that reads newspapers has decreased. We’re trying to find an answer that will hurt the argument that television caused the decline.
With C, we know now that the few people who still read newspapers read them for longer periods of time. It could be that people just read a lot more know for some reason, or the people who read only an article are the people who’ve dropped off reading them at all and the average has just skewed that way. Either way, it doesn’t do much to the argument that television caused the decline in newspaper reading.
What we need is an answer that disconnects the television and newspaper reading, which we find in B.
