Page 443 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Rat ngs

spawning 11 feature films, five spin-off television programs (including an animated
children’s program), and a multitude of books and merchandising efforts.
1983—A letter-writing campaign overseen by Dorothy Swanson leads CBS to reverse
its decision to cancel the series Cagney & Lacey. In the wake of the success of this
campaign, Ms. Swanson went on to found the organization Viewers for Quality Televi-
sion, which for 16 years advocated on behalf of high-quality television programs and is
credited with extending the life span of a number of high-quality programs that might
otherwise have been canceled.
1996—CBS first moves, and then cancels the long-running mystery series, Murder, She
Wrote, despite the fact that the program was attracting a larger audience than com-
peting programs on ABC and NBC in its Sunday night time slot. However, because
Murder, She Wrote tended to attract older viewers, it was earning significantly less in
advertising revenues than programs with much smaller audiences.
1996—FOX cancels America’s Most Wanted, one of the network’s highest-rated shows,
reportedly because the network wanted to replace the program with a show that
could be more profitable in after-markets such as syndication and DVD sales. A letter-
writing campaign, which included requests from the director of the FBI, governors of
37 states, and police departments from around the country, led FOX to quickly reverse
its decision.
2005—FOX revives the animated prime-time program, Family Guy, which it canceled in
2002 due to low ratings, due primarily to the strength of the program’s DVD sales and
the performance of reruns on the Comedy Central cable network.

CriTiCisms, sCiEnCE, anD aCCuraCy

All of these ratings systems have a number of traits in common. Perhaps the
most important is that they produce ratings from a sample of the total audience,
yet the ratings numbers are presumed to represent the total population of televi-
sion, radio, and Web users in the United States. This may seem somewhat sur-
prising given that these samples are in fact quite small in comparison with the
total size of the audience. For instance, Nielsen/NetRatings monitors the Web
usage of only 140,000 of the more than 70 million households with Internet ac-
cess in the United States. Similarly, Nielsen Media Research monitors the televi-
sion viewing of only 10,000 of the more than 100 million television households
in the United States.
How can the television viewing habits of only 10,000 households accurately
represent the tastes of over 100 million U.S. television households? The answer
lies in the process of sampling. Ratings firms strive to develop representative
samples. A representative sample is one that accurately reflects the characteris-
tics of the broader population from which it was drawn. There is an entire com-
plex science devoted to the process of sampling, and ratings firms are experts in
this science, as the quality of their product depends on the extent to which it ac-
curately reflects the media consumption habits of the population as a whole. Just
as political polls project election outcomes based on surveys of representative