Page 128 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 116
audience which made the BBC decide in 1936 to hire Robert Silvey to set up a listener
research division. The felt need for pure information gave research its justification. To
what use that information was going to be put, however, was unclear. Reith, for example,
had mixed feelings about research. He feared it might inhibit programme makers, and
warned against the dangers of building programmes on the basis of empirical information
about listeners’ preferences (Briggs 1985:149). Another BBC official put his rejection of
any kind of survey research even more militantly:

As I hold very strongly that the ordinary listener does not know what he
likes, and is tolerably well satisfied, as shown by correspondence and
licence figures, with the mixed fare now offered, I cannot escape the
feeling that any money, time or trouble spent upon elaborate enquiries
into his tastes and preferences would be wasted.
(In Briggs 1965:261)

This stance is quite understandable given the BBC’s authoritarian paternalist ambitions in
the Reithean period, which aimed to change, not anticipate, audience taste. Others within
the BBC, however, were more excited. As Silvey (1974:32) recalled, while some ‘simply
refused to believe that any systematic study of the public was possible at all’, others had a
‘greatly exaggerated’ view of the potentiality of research. Silvey himself held that
audience research is a matter of duty: the duty for a public service broadcasting
organization like the BBC ‘to take proper account of the opinions and needs of all its
many different publics’ (ibid., 12). In other words, information seeking is presented here
as a means of communication, as an act of responsibility and accountability towards the
public.
In the Netherlands, too, the setting up of audience research did not originate in
commercial motives and interests. In the early 1960s, the five pillarized broadcasting
organizations, including VARA, began to realize their lack of knowledge about the
audience, their assumed closeness to their respective ‘natural constituencies’
notwithstanding. Because separate research efforts by each broadcasting organization
would be too expensive, a joint initiative was taken to set up a continuous audience
measurement system, which started to operate in 1965. Its justification was entirely cast
in the expectation that research could serve as a compensation for the institutional
invisibility of the broadcast audience:

The programme makers are interested in ‘hard’ audience figures for
individual radio and television programmes, and in how they are rated by
the audience. Programme makers need to know to whom a particular
programme appeals so that they can reach their intended audience. They
would like to have their finger continually on the audience’s pulse in order
to see whether the aims of their programme policy are being realized.
(Werkgroep Luister- en Kijkonderzoek 1963)

Silvey’s Audience Research Department had already acquired a fine reputation and one
Dutch researcher was sent to London to learn from Silvey and his co-workers (Bakker
1964).