Page 137 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Repairing the loss: the desire for audience information 125
sessions in pretesting research. VARA researcher Dick Wensink observed at first hand
how they are often appalled or surprised by what actual viewers have to say about and do
with ‘their’ programmes. Often, this is the first time a programme maker is confronted
head-on with views from ‘the other side’. A sense of disbelief predominates: how could
people miscomprehend, dislike, or overlook things put into the programmes with so much
dedicated professionalism? All sorts of defence mechanisms are mobilized to find a
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reassuring explanation for viewers’ ‘misconceptions’. In another instance, a British
programme maker, watching a video of viewers watching his programme, was reportedly
so shocked by what the viewers ‘did’ to his programme that he couldn’t bear it any longer
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and decided to stop watching. Research begins to take on disturbing qualities here: the
actual audiences come too close, become too ‘real’.
‘Audience research is valuable because its results can be disconcerting’, states the
Annan Committee in its assessment of the potential uses of research. ‘The results may
upset long cherished myths held by broadcasters and make them rethink the way to
achieve their objectives’ (Home Office 1977:458). Quite so, but in practice it is precisely
when results are disconcerting that the truth value of research tends to be questioned,
because it undermines the programme maker’s professional self confidence. It is in such
situations that sentiment grows that TV researchers risk becoming dictators’, as The
Independent reports (Douglas 1989).
In their overview of work on professional mass communicators, Ettema, Whitney and
Wackman (1987:759) have noted that ‘individual creators need not have a clear idea of
whom their audience is or what the audience wants. They need not even grasp the full
meaning of their work; it is the industry system as a whole through box office receipts
and track records that attunes content to audience and to critic.’ This institutional state of
affairs is shared by all broadcasters alike, whether they work in commercial or public
service settings. Public service broadcasters too, then, work in a structural context which
bolsters a love/hate relationship with actual audiences. Their institutional point of view
makes it almost impossible for them to avoid seeing the audience—in whose benefit they
are assumed to work—as a nuisance, as a recalcitrant other whose visibility needs to be
held in check. Perhaps this is the fundamental reason why in the end, despite all criticism
and warnings against its dangers, it is the conveniently objectifying information provided
by ratings discourse, useful as a management tool of control but principally inadequate as
a form of cultural and philosophical self-reflection, that has become the dominant way of
knowing the audience in public service broadcasting institutions as well.