Page 53 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Commercial knowledge: measuring the audience 41
other medium anywhere in the world can match the variety and quality of the total output
of the programs that weather our ratings system to reach the American public’.
Established here is the reduction of popularity to a matter of numerical superiority, as
well as the easy equating of numerical superiority with audience preference—as the term
‘ratings’ as such suggests. But such discursive simplifications are not ‘ideological’ in the
sense that they are ‘false’. Rather, they exemplify a representation of the relation between
television and its audience which has been made possible by the very existence of ratings.
As I will clarify, the power of ratings is productive not repressive: they exert influence
primarily by enabling the putting together of a coherent, streamlined map of ‘television
audience’—a map that charts the ways in which the industry defines the audience as
market.
Meanwhile, it is not surprising that Beville holds such a high-minded, legitimizing
view of ratings. After all, he speaks from the partisan perspective of someone who has
committed almost his whole professional life to industry-related broadcast research. Thus
inhabiting the institutional point of view, he asserts that by providing information about
the audience that is reached by a given programme or station, ratings give the industry a
regulating device that is crucial for success: ‘Programs are the heart of broadcasting,
while sales provide the muscle. Ratings with their feedback element are the nerve system
that largely controls what is broadcast’ (ibid., xi). However, what remains unclear here is
exactly how this ‘nerve system’ works. What falls beyond Beville’s consideration is the
mechanisms of all that determining, governing, and dictating that ratings seem to succeed
in carrying out. What is it about ratings that gives them so much leverage? If they
constitute a ‘feedback element’, in what sense do they perform that function?
Beville’s optimistic account is based upon the common sense assumption, shared by
ratings’ proponents and opponents alike, that ratings are so important because they
supply the industry with valid and reliable data about the audience, data which it needs in
order to be able to operate and to evaluate its performance. Pure and simple, then, it is
assumed that ratings represent more or less objective knowledge about the audience,
obtained through methodologically sound procedures. Resulting from this
‘epistemologically deterministic’ assumption is the idea that ratings have a purely
instrumental function in industry policy and practice. Ratings are highly appreciated
because they are useful, and they are useful because they supply the broadcasters with
pure information.
Strangely enough, much criticism of ratings tends to reproduce this instrumentalist
view by uncritically acceding to the assumption that audience measurement is a question
of science. Attacks on ratings, then, are typically levelled at its perceived methodological
shortcomings: the samples are too small and biased, the measurement instruments are not
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accurate, and so on. However, the very frenzy with which ratings are devoured day after
day by industry people suggests that something more dramatic is at stake here. One
network executive, NBC’s William Rubens, has even spoken about a ‘psychic need for
ratings’, which he relates to ‘the very human need to know how well you are doing’
(quoted in Beville 1985:187). In other words, what ratings seem to satisfy is not just the
need for practical and objective information, but a more generalized, diffuse need to
know, which in turn is related to the wish ‘to do well’. And ‘how well you are doing’ can
apparently be known by looking at figures and statistics which are seen as mirroring
audience behaviour—the ultimate yardstick for doing well in the commercial television