Page 164 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 152
independent body, BARB (Broadcasters Audience Research Board), in which
representatives of the BBC, ITV and the advertising community are grouped. See e.g.
Fiddick 1989.
3 Metered measurement was set up by STER (On Air Advertising Foundation), an independent
organization within the Dutch broadcasting system that sells air time for spot advertising.
STER revenues go to the benefit of the public broadcasting organizations and make up about
one third of their budget.
4 It concerns the AGB 4900 People Meter.
5 Appreciation is not measured in the case of foreign channels, teletext and VCR use.
6 Among the things studied were the comprehensibility of several BBC programmes. Often, the
results were rather unfavourable for the broadcasters, which led Silvey (1974:142) to
comment that ‘the findings of the inquiry were received with something less than ecstacy in
some quarters’. The BBC also took the initiative to investigate the effects of television on
children, which resulted in Hilde Himmelweit et al.’s classic study Television and the Child
(1958), while the psychologist William Belson was appointed to an inquiry into the effects
of television on adults.
7 Personal communication, 8 March 1989.
8 Reported to me by Dick Wensink, VARA researcher, personal communication (15 February
1989).
9 The Swedish Audience and Programme Research Department uses the telephone interview as
a method of measuring the audience.
10 This sums up the basic framework of the suggested model, although the model as a whole is
more complicated as it also allows for context variables such as the supply of the
competition. See Van Cuilenburg and McQuail (1988).
11 According to Dick Wensink and Wim Bekkers, personal communication, 8 March 1989.
12 Wensink, personal communication, 15 February 1989. Nevertheless, interest in pre-testing
research is flourishing because pre-testing results do sometimes prove to predict future
ratings. For example, VARA decided to schedule the Australian soap opera Neighbours, then
already hugely popular in Britain, on the basis of satisfying pre-testing results. However, the
American experience (where pre-testing has been practised by the commercial networks
since the very beginning) has shown that the predictive value of this research instrument is at
least limited: programmes that do not do well in pre-testing sessions can become tolerably
successful as well, the most famous examples being the situation comedy All in the Family
and police series Hill Street Blues. See Gitlin (1983) and Stipp (1987).
13 The video is a specimen of Collett and Lamb’s research of people watching television (who
videotaped people in front of the small screen); the (tragic) anecdote was mentioned in
Morley (1989).

Conclusions
1 For an historical and sociological analysis of the task of intellectuals as ‘interpreters’ in
(post)modern culture and society, see Bauman (1987).
2 For a methodological critique of this ‘finding’, see Wober and Gunter (1986).
3 A similarly objectivist and totalizing picture is offered in Barwise and Ehrenberg (1988). It
should be noted that these authors have a business school background; it is therefore not
surprising that they tend to formulate problems in terms relevant to the business world
(advertisers, the marketeers).
4 See, for other critiques of these research traditions, e.g. Elliott (1974); Bybee (1987);
Newcomb 1978; Hirsch (1980; 1981).