Page 134 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 122
extremely difficult one to investigate…. It takes a lively imagination to
conjure up the taste of a new dish from reading the recipe.
(Silvey 1974:110, emphasis in the original)

This slip into empiricism, embodied by audience research, articulates the basic dilemma
of the project of public service broadcasting. It is undeniable that empirical knowledge
does have a liberating potential in that it can supply broadcasters with a clearer map of
the audience out there, but in privileging fact over value it tends to marginalize the
normative aspects involved in the very idea of public service broadcasting. It encourages
the treatment of existing, empirically observable audience behaviour as given not as
something to be changed. It is for this reason that research as such has a fundamentally
ambiguous place in public service broadcasting. As the Annan Committee has so
eloquently put it:

Audience research can be an aid for the producer and a guide to the
scheduler; but it cannot take the place of the judgement of either. As
David Hume long ago showed, the social sciences cannot usurp the role of
moral judgement. Inferences from the one are no substitute for the
excercise of the other.
(Home Office 1977:459)

In this respect, it is interesting to note that in some other European countries audience
measurement has long been much less important than in Britain or the Netherlands. The
Scandinavian countries, where commitment to reformist public service ideals has
remained very strong so far, are a case in point. In Norway, any form of research has
been met with widespread opposition until well into the 1980s, in the belief that
programming should not be influenced by empirical audience information (Rolland
1989). The Danish Broadcasting Corporation only started to develop in-house audience
research in 1973 (Svendsen 1989). In both countries, however, the felt need for audience
information has grown as a result of the waning of public service monopoly, resulting in
a considerable increase of research activity, to the point even that ideas for implementing
continuous audience measurement using people meter technology are taking root.
Swedish broadcasting does have a long and extensive research tradition, but all explicitly
carried out ‘in the spirit of public service’, one of its central motifs being the
consideration that ‘educational content must continue to be able to reach its audiences
effectively’ (Cronholm 1989:26). Significantly, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation is
one of the very few European public broadcasting institutions that has decided not to
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convert to a metred audience measurement system for the time being.
In general, however, the seemingly unstoppable European trend, just as in the United
States, is an ever more singleminded emphasis on, and preoccupation with sophistication
of audience measurement technologies and procedures, warnings as expressed by the
Annan Committee notwithstanding. Ever more expensive and more comprehensive
systems are being proposed by several competing research firms such as AGB and
Nielsen, not only nationally, but also at an international, pan-European level—a
development instigated by the coming integration of Europe as a single market in 1992
(De Bock 1984; Durand 1988). As one British commentator cynically notes, ‘We are all