Page 29 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Institutional knowledge: the need to control 17
power—that is the power to select programmes for transmission—lies in the hands of
those occupying the administrative and managerial echelons of the television institution
(Ettema et al. 1987). At this level, the problem of how-to-get-an-audience is not primarily
the craftman’s one of how to steer or constrain creativity in order to come to a finished
aesthetic product (the programme), but is related to the more encompassing problem of
overall organizational policy, which is ultimately aimed at creating and securing the
institutional conditions in which a relationship with the audience can be established and
maintained. It is at this level that having (and keeping) an audience tout court forms the
single most important goal, and here too knowledge about the audience, both formal and
informal, is used to help managers to make the decisions needed to reach that goal.
Consider, for example, the perspective of network executive Brandon Tartikoff,
president of NBC Entertainment and responsible for airing much-acclaimed series such
as Hill Street Blues, Cheers and Miami Vice. As a result, he acquired the distinctive
reputation of being a programmer with an eye for ‘quality’—something which, in what
has been called the ‘vast wasteland’ of American commercial television (Boddy 1990) is
quite a feat indeed. But this does not hold him from setting his standards within a definite
idea of ‘what the audience wants’. He asserts: ’I probably have more esoteric tastes than
the average television viewer. I’ll go to see Amadeus and pay my five dollars and fifty
cents, but when the salesman from Orion [a production company] comes and asks me to
buy it for the networks, I’ll say no, because it’s going to get a twenty-two share’, which
is, he implies, not enough because ‘as a programmer I had to ask myself if it was
something that would get a thirty share or better’ (in Levinson and Link 1986:256–7).
Thus separating personal taste and market judgement, Tartikoff extemporaneously
adheres to the principle of ‘audience maximization’, which reigns so supreme in the
operations of American commercial television. The language in which this principle is
expressed is the quantitative one of ‘shares’—a language that is only made possible by
the existence of a very formalized procedure of knowledge production: audience
measurement.
As a form of systematic research in which empirical information is gathered through
quantifying scientific methods, audience measurement supplies a technical and formal
kind of knowledge whose mode and status differs fundamentally from the intuitive, all-
but-immaterial knowledges about the audience put forward and used by programme
creators during events such as the story conference. For one thing, knowledge gained
through research is produced by experts, whom Harold Wilensky (1967) has called facts-
and-figures men, while the subjective and informal forms of knowledge circulating
within the creative community remain largely implicit in the creative process itself. The
first kind of knowledge holds the official status of ‘organizational intelligence’ (ibid.)
within the industry because it enables managers such as Tartikoff to speak about the
audience in tangible, apparently objective terms, and as I will show in Part II, it is
precisely this sense of objectivity that accounts for audience measurement’s centrality as
a power/knowledge device in the structural operations of commercial television. Even the
creative community ultimately has to submit, often grudgingly, to the regime of truth
established by audience measurement, the truth of ‘shares’ and ‘ratings’, because it is this
regime of truth that has the final say over what counts as ‘success’ and ‘failure’ (Cantor
1980; Gitlin 1983). Thus, within the television industry a hierarchy of diverse forms of
knowledge about the audience has been established: the contextualized and more or less