One of the best ways to get to ABC (assuming they don't pull the Foxumentary) is with ratings ---or rather a lack there of. Ratings set advertising rates and determine what airs --- even though this fake 9/11 movie has no (or minimal advertising) bad ratings would be excellent mud or rather shit in the eye of ABC.
While it would be nice if lots of us in the normal (aka leftie) blogging community had nielsen meters to affect ratings --- if you do, go for it
Since in a previous diary someone asked me how this all works, i guess this is as appropriate time as any to give the Nielsen 101 talk.
How Nielsen does the ratings
The only reason I know all this useless information is because I took a course in college on Television measurement given by an ex-employee of the company that measures Television in Europe. And of course working at a TV station many years ago (but not now) helps.
Well I wish there was a simple answer --- but of course there is not. There are essentially three different methodologies used in gathering TV viewing data. And those methodologies vary based on national TV viewing collection and local TV collection.
Most importantly you cannot volunteer to be a Nielsen family - you are selected. Just like you cannot volunteer to have your country ruined by George Bush, you have to be selected by the idiot. Our dear cokehead leader bestows the privilege of being selected as one of the countries (while in the past it was baseball teams) that he wants to ruin. Nielsen has the same principal - no volunteers.
On a national level, Nielsen collects their data from something known as the "people meter." Approximately 10,000 homes around the United States are selected (randomly based on several characteristics such as geography and ethnicity) as "Nielsen homes." People meters are installed in their homes and all members of the household are given a button to push when they are watching TV. Sounds so simple huh? Well it ain't. The room for error is great and it is a system dependent on people pushing their buttons when they watch and that people will push correctly. Demographic breakdowns are based on the buttons - each person's button is coded with their age and gender. There are strict rules on crediting stations - remember a LOT of people are channel surfers. After all this data is collected on a daily basis, it goes into some Nielsen magic numbers churner and out pops a rating. Don't ask what goes into this calculation --- Einstein wouldn't understand it. But the people meter doesn't make an error in recording what you watch - the primary source of error is NOT pushing your button or pushing the wrong one (or in many cases falling asleep in front C-SPAN). I can imagine the person who analyzes this data at Nielsen chuckling when they see a bunch of 54 year old males in Roanoke, Virginia (near the dear Mr Falwell) watching Teletubbies or Barney. You can't hide your sexual inclinations from the fine folks at Nielsen!
For local market television --- three different ways to measure are employed. The 10 biggest cities (like New York, Chicago, Dallas etc.) use the same equipment and method as national. Nielsen will expand this list to the top 25 cities soon. Around 800 meters or so are installed in these cities. Just imagine - 800 meters in New York represent 20,000,000 people. Seems reasonable HA! Also a show that does well in one city (think the State of the Union address airing in Waco) can do poorly in another city (think New York, Boston or any other place). A Red Sox game in Boston probably does a helluva lot better than a Yankee game.
Around 30 or so markets use a combination of a non-people meter and hand written diary. The meter utilized in these markets does not register age/gender but ONLY if a home is watching and what channel they are watching (hence the famous Household rating). Manually filled in diaries supplement these meters to give you age/gender ratings. Cities like Nashville, San Diego, Kansas City and San Antonio have this dual method. Can you imagine trying to write down every channel you watch and every program --- and if you are a channel surfer how does one write down all the channels you watch in a short period of time. What if you forget to fill in the diary on a given day --- do you guess? I cannot remember what I had for dinner last night, there is no way I would remember what I watched 6 days ago. These diaries are only utilized during the infamous "sweeps" months of November, February and May. Hence the hype of specials and "special" guest appearances --- this way you get people to remember they watched "CSI" and write it down because they recalled that Jerry Lewis and Charo were the guest stars. I am not sure how long you have to fill out a diary - but since a sweep is a month, then I would guess around 30 days.
The smaller cities like Burlington, Savannah, LaCrosse, Spokane etc. use ONLY a diary - no electronic measurement. Their ratings are totally dependent on human recall and the ability to decipher bad handwriting. Even third world countries in Latin America have a better system than manual diary entries. I can only imagine the stuff that people write down -- like "soap opera" instead of All My Children, or the show with the blue news set instead of Nightline, or better ---- The George Bush Comedy Hour instead of Presidential Press Conference (then again they are one in the same). I think it might be fun to be a diary reader for Nielsen to see the creativity in title naming. I have no idea how many diaries are mailed out in each city, but I would imagine for every 10 they mail out (these people are recruited randomly as well, no volunteers again) at best 2 or 3 would be returned. I don't know what makes diaries statistically sound, but the whole process sounds awfully suspect to me. What if you mail out 5,000 diaries (that is a guess) and only 500 are returned --- that is a 10% return, good for direct marketing, bad for a TV sample. And what if all of those 500 are men --- what do you do for women ratings, make them up? Also I would think that for manually written diaries the names of the shows are kind of important --- Cold Case can be mixed up with Cold Pizza, Late Night with David Letterman sounds like Late Night with Conan O'Brien, while Oprah smartly named her show unlike any other --- Uma Thurman doesn't have a talk show - yet.
I know Nielsen accounts for homes with cable, satellite, TIVOs but I have no idea how. And some of those cable homes have 700+ channels. I also know Nielsen accounts for homes with kids, and ethnicity (like Hispanic and Asian) since those types of homes have very different viewing than homes with only adults or no ethnic/language issues. I wonder what the diary reader does when they encounter a diary filled out in Mandarin?
So all these shows - the hits, the misses, the cancellations, the Charo-filled guest star extravaganzas - are all based on less than 20,000 meters and a whole bunch of hand written diaries. For a country of nearly 300,000,000 (but remember around 20% doesn't count since 59,000,000 complete morons voted for Bush in '04 and deserve no credit) it seems amazing that such monumental decisions (do I cancel Tony Danza? Do we lead with John Karr or Madonna? Do we keep Paula Abdul?) are based on so few people. Then again having the moron-in-chief as our president was based on only 9 people.
Now are we all Nielsen experts. And when you push your buttons make sure your ABC station isnt on.