Page 30 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 18
instinctive knowledge that is inherent in the savoir-faire of programme creation is
ultimately subordinated, qua knowledge about the audience, to the stipulated, official and
generalized knowledge produced by the discourse of audience measurement.
In fact, not only audience measurement, but research in general, with its aura of
scientific rationality, has acquired an entrenched position in the institution as a whole.
The elevated status of research as a means of providing the institution with ‘seemingly
systematic, impersonal, reliable ways to predict success and failure’ (Gitlin 1983:31) is
exemplified by the career of Frank Stanton, who was hired as a researcher by CBS in
1935 and subsequently rose to become president of the corporation for twenty-five years.
As Todd Gitlin (ibid.: 43) has remarked, ‘Stanton embodied the postwar legitimacy,
indeed the necessity, of facts-and-figures research in the culture industry’. Stanton was a
pioneer in the field of audience research; together with Paul Lazarsfeld, the father of
American mass communication research, he developed the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program
Analyzer, the first device for measuring audience reactions to radio and still the basis for
CBS’s television pre-testing system—a system aimed at testing programmes before they
get on the air (Levy 1982). The three national networks of American commercial
television, ABC, CBS and NBC, all routinely engage in this practice of pre-testing which,
in Gitlin’s (1983:32) cynical words, consists of the production of ‘numbers to predict
numbers’, that is, the creation of ‘artificial test markets in hothouse settings where
audience reactions can be cheaply reduced to numerical measures that they hope might
predict eventual ratings’.
Research is often motivated and legitimized for its role in rationalizing managerial
decision-making procedures. Indeed, where uncertainty or disagreement about the chance
of success is particularly marked, resort to a neutral, non-subjective, facts-and-figures
discourse, which pretends to provide the most explicit and systematic knowledge about
the audience, is preferred in order to manage intra-industry relationships and mobilize
support for unpopular or controversial decisions. Thus, pre-testing results can be
capitalized upon in negotiations between creators and managers—something which is
especially useful when opinion is divided: ’Network executives find it convenient to tell
producers that their shows aren’t being picked up because of low test scores, thereby
deflecting some of the supplier’s anger onto the hapless research department’ (ibid.: 45).
Such use of the rhetoric of quantitative justification is a well-known phenomenon in
modern complex organizations (Gephart 1988), and suggests that the aura of ‘scientific
rationality’ that facts-and-figures knowledge possesses is primarily useful for its
rhetorical aptness in institutional practices: more often than not, research is a tool for
symbolic politics rather than for rational decision-making. Therefore, research itself does
not go uncontested within the institutions. As Gitlin (1983:45) has noted, ‘Valued but
scorned, cited but patronized, [the] ambiguous position [of research] represents the
culture industry’s uneasy attempt to accommodate its industrial reality’.
Yet the importance of research can only be understood precisely in the light of this
institutional uneasiness. Against this background, we should not only look at the
differences in modalities of knowledge about the audience that circulate within television
institutions, but also at their common conditions of production, their shared institutional
context and function. No matter whether they are formal or informal, explicit or implicit,
scientific or intuitive, ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’, they are all forms of interested
knowledge, aimed at inducing strategic know-how: their purpose is to clarify what one