Page 52 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 40
are the most well known. These figures can be delivered to the desks of network
5
executives the next morning.
It is well-known that ratings play a tremendously important role within the
commercial television industry, particularly the American one. Beville expresses the
generally accepted understanding about the scope of ratings’ role when he sums up:

They determine the price that will be paid for programmes and the pay
that performers will receive. They govern the rates that advertisers will
pay for 60-second or 30-second or smaller units in and around a
programme. Ratings determine stations’ audience and rank order in their
market, and to a large degree they dictate the profitability of broadcasting
stations and their value when put up for sale. The salary and bonus
compensation of key network and station officials are also governed by
ratings success. Ratings results ultimately determine whether top
management and programme and news management in television and
radio broadcast organizations will retain their jobs, be promoted, or
demoted.
(Beville 1985: xi, emphasis added)

This all-importance of ratings, real and perceived, for operations of the television
industry has always been accompanied by severe cultural criticism. One of the most
general assumptions about the negative effects of ratings is their presumably detrimental
influence on the quality of television programming—its contribution to what is often
called the ‘vast wasteland’ of American television (Boddy 1990). For example, critic
Harold Mehling, in an early book on television with the merciless title The Great Time-
Killer (1962), sneers at the authority of ratings within the industry by evoking an
anecdote in which the popular comedian Phil Silvers (Sergeant Bilko) comments on the
epilogue to a rating triumph over Milton Berle, his great rival. Silvers: ‘When I walked
out of the CBS elevator the morning after, all the secretaries rose to their feet and
applauded. There, in one dramatic nutshell, was an indication to me of the height of
frenzy to which the rating race has climbed’ (in Mehling 1962:240). Mehling dismisses
such instances of ‘rating fever’ by succinctly characterizing it as sheer ‘foolishness’, and
it is safe to say that his view represents a widely shared position concerning ratings
6
among cultural and media critics. However, such simple dismissal, in its implied
refusal—or inability—to take what seems so ‘foolish’ seriously as a situation that needs
analysis rather than categorical rejection, has often prevented us from gaining insight into
the structural and institutional reasons why ratings figure so prominently in the business
of commercial television.
The industry itself, for its part, typically justifies the centrality of ratings by stating
again and again that ratings, as estimates of audience size, are more or less direct
reflections of audience taste. In a particularly self-serving leap of argument ratings are
celebrated as guardians of the public interest, as instruments which require that the
television industry ‘give the audience what it wants’. The ideological bearings of this
argument become crudely explicit in, for example, Mal Beville’s (1985:240) self-
congratulatory statement that ‘ratings are…an expression of democracy in action…. No