Page 34 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 22
industry in the institutional framework of commercial television. The discourse of
ratings, dry and technical as it is, provides knowledge about the television audience that
is indispensable for the economic functioning of the system. Good ratings results are the
agreed-upon signifier of effective communication between advertiser and audience, and
the commercial networks must try to achieve those good ratings results—that is, to
maximize their audience—through shrewd and attractive programming. As CBS
executive Arnold Becker told Todd Gitlin (1983:31): ‘I’m not interested in culture. I’m
not interested in pro-social values. I have only one interest. That’s whether people watch
the program. That’s my definition of good, that’s my definition of bad.’
The television programme then is the main instrument in commercial television’s
constant quest for the maximum audience. As Nick Browne (1984:178) has noted, ‘the
network is basically a relay in a process of textualizing the interaction of audience and
advertiser’. This process of textualizing—the process of translating the goal of maximum
ratings results into concrete decisions about the programmes to be scheduled—is the core
of the networks’ task: the day-to-day activities of network managers ultimately revolve
around constantly finding ways of regulating this difficult and complex process along
orderly and manageable lines.
Ratings play a central role in this process, but that role is a highly ambivalent one. On
the one hand, it offers managers a sense of knowing how successful the textualizing has
been (what is called ‘feedback’), but on the other hand, it leaves them in profound
ignorance, or at least in great doubt, about the precise ingredients of their success or
failure. That is, although ratings produce some generalized information about who has
watched which programmes, they do not give any clue about the more specific question
of what made people watch the programmes, so that it is very difficult to use ratings to
predict future success or failure (Pekurny 1982).
Nevertheless, in the political economy of commercial television audience
measurement is an indispensible knowledge-producing instrument. In the commercial
system, the imperative of conquering the audience ensues from the positioning of the
audience as a market in which audience members are defined as potential consumers in a
dual sense: not only of TV programmes, but also of the products being advertised through
those programmes (McQuail 1987:220–1). What is essential in this context is knowledge
about the size of the market, and this is precisely what ‘ratings’ and ‘shares’ are
purported to signify. However, determining the size of the market is a difficult and
problematic task, as is evidenced by the ever-increasing technological sophistication of
the methods being used for measuring the audience, that took an accelarated pace in the
1980s and reached a temporary climax with the introduction of the so-called ‘people
meter’, an advanced and expensive measurement device that provoked intense
controversy in circles of the American television industry. This controversy, which shows
how epistemological and political issues, issues of knowledge and power, are inextricably
linked in commercial television’s institutional point of view, will be described
extensively in Part II.
In the philosophy of public service broadcasting, an altogether different place is
reserved for the audience. Of course, the idea of ‘public service’ as such can be and has
been interpreted and concretized in a variety of ways in diverse national contexts,
manifested in historical particularities in institutional structure and socio-political and
ideological grounding. However despite such idiosyncracies it can be said that in classic