Page 69 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The streamlined audience disrupted: impact of the new technologies 57
medium greatly different from, and superior to, broadcast television (Streeter 1987), the
dominant use of cable has become simply that of an extension of broadcast television. As
a matter of course, the measurement of the cable audience appeared on the agenda of the
ratings producers. However, audiences for cable channels proved to be very difficult to
measure. The traditional techniques used to measure the broadcast television audience—
setmeters and diaries—did not succeed in producing accurate and consistent figures for
the size and composition of the cable audience (Livingston 1986). The diary method
especially was blamed for having serious flaws. According to a large-scale methodology
study performed by Nielsen in 1983, diaries tended to underestimate cable audiences up
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to a dramatic figure of 45 per cent (Beville 1985). Thus, frustration abounded among
cable industry managers: in their view, cable’s position vis-à-vis the networks was done
serious harm as a result of ‘misrepresentations’ (that is: underestimation) of their share of
audience in the Nielsen data. So, insistent calls for ‘correct measurement’ and ‘getting the
methodology right’ were the central tenets in the cable industry’s ‘love-hate relationship’
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with Nielsen (Livingston 1986).
The shortcomings of the diary method as an audience measurement instrument were
actually not exactly news for the industry. It has always been acknowledged that, because
the gathering of data through diaries is dependent on the active participation of viewers in
the sample, bias in the results is perfectly possible as a consequence of errors or
inaccuracies in the diary keeping process. As early as 1962 for example, Harold Mehling,
in his sweeping crusade against ‘the rating game’, ridiculed the method by gleefully
making up the following scene behind the closed doors of a sample family home:

HUSBAND: While you’re putting out the lights, dear, I’ll fill out the diary for this
evening—oh-oh, for the last two evenings. We didn’t fill it out last night. Let’s see, we
watched The Play of the Week and CBS Reports, right?
WIFE: Yes, but the children saw the cartoon show. You’d better put that down. You
don’t want it all that kind of thing.
HUSBAND: You’re right. [They] did say [their] ratings help them figure out what people
want to see, and we shouldn’t weight it with our highbrow stuff, should we?
WIFE: No, it wouldn’t be fair. A lot of people get a kick out of the wrestling, you know.
HUSBAND: Well, what did we see tonight? There was Eyewitness, and that concert
show they got from the educational station. That’s all—well, now wait. I’m not going
to impose my Beethoven on everybody. I considered watching Rawhide for once, so I
think I’ll just…’
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(Mehling 1962:225)
Mehling’s message is clear: the diary method is too subjective to be a reliable instrument
for measuring even such a simple thing as ‘who’s watching what’. (In his view, the
‘Nielsen family’ is a ‘subspecies of viewers’ created by the practice of the ratings firms
themselves.)
The industry has never been unaware of the problem of subjectivity in the diary
technique. On the contrary, there has always been distrust of people’s accuracy in filling
out the diary. But possible inaccuracies, let alone such highly individualistic, willingly
distorting twists in deciding what to write down in the diary as imagined in Mehling’s
absurd scene, fall beyond the grasp of the ratings producers: they are fundamentally