Crossroads of power: The media, democracy, and the audience

The media has long been seen as an access-gate to democracy and an important contributor to a knowledgeable citizenry. However in today’s corporate age there is a growing sense of audience disengagement in the face of the agenda-setting power of the media combined with its rampant commercialisation. It is the contention of this paper that if the media doesn’t offer access to power for its audiences, then they will seize it for themselves. The paper will examine the history of the citizen-critic in relation to the media. The media plays a major role in shaping opinion and policy and offering interpretation of public events. The more the audience engages with the media’s interpretation, the more engaged they become with the democratic process. But journalism is just as capable of restricting the flow of information as providing it. This restriction occurs as the media become political players themselves. They have an agenda-setting role which is particularly noticeable during election periods. Political parties attempt to counter the media agenda by focussing the discussion on issues they are perceived to “own”. The challenge is for politicians to consider the media needs of their audiences. This perception is set by opinion polls which have their own, often negative, impact on political campaigns. There is also a challenge posed by the dumbing down of the media as they become more commercialised. In contrast, alternative media such as public access broadcasting and the Internet are providing audiences with ways to reclaim the agenda and develop their sense of citizenship in new ways.

To begin with, it is helpful to examine some historical senses of citizenship. Promotion of democracy and citizenship was central to the purpose of early printer-editors such as Benjamin Franklin. They left an important legacy of a free press and freedom of speech which are now considered essential elements in a healthy democracy. Anthony Lewis wrote that the First Amendment did not protect the press for its own sake but to enable a free political system to operate on behalf of “the citizen-critic of the government”. The concept of a citizen signifies the right of an individual to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society. According to the social responsibility theory of the press, media operators are obliged to make sure all significant viewpoints of the citizenry are represented and this was a matter for the public as much as owners and editors to decide. These views could be contested in the public sphere. According to Habermas, the public sphere was a realm that was autonomous of the state and the market place. This was required because power exists in both the sphere of the state and the economic realm. But although public opinion is able to reach judgements on public matters, it is not the public but groups and organisations backed by sophisticated public relations which actually shape policy decisions and outcomes. Therefore while the concept of public opinion is important, it is a contested space of competing interests.

Journalism plays a major role in creating the shape of this contested space. For most people, political opinion is not directly shaped by politics but is mediated by news accounts. Lippman described how people gradually build a trustworthy picture inside their heads of the world beyond their reach conveyed to them by the media. The media limits the freedom of policy makers to select among the available policy options and channels that selection in one or other direction. Therefore, journalists play a crucial role in forming understanding of public policy. According to Adam, journalism is an act of imagination which “produces the forms of public consciousness that makes collective existence possible”. This means that as well as reporting the news, journalists also interpret it in order to make sense of issues and events.

News interpretation requires an active audience. Norris et al's landmark research into Britain’s 1997 election found that the short-term impact of the news media is greatly exaggerated. Studies show that audiences consume news in a sporadic way and flit from story to story without following them to completion. However, they also established that people who were more attentive to the news were more knowledgeable and had higher levels of civic engagement. The more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation. Norris et al saw this process as a “virtuous circle” with the media providing a positive cumulative effect. Active audiences engage with, and enrich, the news they receive.

However, positive audience consumption of news does depend on the quality of the news itself. Journalistic practices can restrict the flow and quality of information to the audience. The journalist’s need to produce a good story is often antithetical to the practice of writing investigative journalism. Investigative journalism is news in its truest sense; the striving to bring to public attention something someone does not want the public to know. Yet the final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, un-entertaining and inconclusive. The desire to print more entertaining stories exacerbates the trend towards “tabloidisation” which impedes the audience’s civic competence. The result is an increasingly downmarket media and a less informed citizenry.

This downmarket pull may also be driven by political considerations. The media are political actors in their own right. The way the media present stories and events produces a carefully constructed world in which some voices are allowed to speak and some are not. In their influence book "Policing the Crisis" Hall et al say that the twin demands of deadlines and the need to be impartial combine to produce a systematic over-accessing to the media of those in powerful and privileged positions. Other critics have attacked journalism for its ideological effects and role in reproducing the capitalist order in choosing sources as mouthpieces of their authority. Researchers show that media content is best conceived as the outcome of an unequal relationship between sources and journalists; a relationship that is often manipulated by those making the information available. But the audience is not well served by this battle of agendas between the media and their sources.

The media’s agenda-setting power is particularly prevalent during election times. The theory of agenda-setting suggests that the media tell people not “what to think” but “what to think about”. The media are often more participants than observers in election contests wielding power in setting agendas, the coverage of campaign events and issues, and even in the outright support of political parties. Other studies suggest that this results in a process of confirmation of prejudices rather than one of challenging assumptions. In Australia, media coverage reinforces the dominance of the major parties as well as the over-concentration on the party leaders. Control of the agenda affords great power to the media to affect democratic outcomes.

Political actors are quick to act in response to media agenda-setting practices. Election campaigns invariably veer towards issues which favour the candidates. Theories of issue ownership suggest that it is difficult for parties to gain electoral advantage on issues they do not “own”. The news media see themselves as major players in politics but lack governing responsibility or a guiding philosophy other than a negative challenging of all comers. Many politicians have attempted to get around this. In his 1992 election campaign, Bill Clinton maximised control over the media message by cultivating talk show hosts, MTV and similar programs where he was able to focus on stories and issues where he enjoyed a favourable reputation. Exposure on these “alternative” programs made it possible for him to connect with voters and explain his policy positions without being interrupted by his draft record or his infidelities. The intimate communication of television means it is an excellent medium to elicit an emotional response that reinforces a difficult political message or distracts from policy shortcomings. Similarly, research in Britain into the radio phone-in program Election Call showed the vast majority of callers were pleased with their involvement in the show. Their satisfaction was related to their ability to influence public agenda and to have their concerns taken seriously. It is possible therefore, to subvert the media agenda-setting powers with adroit use of the media’s own facilities.

These examples show up a paradox in the relationship between media and politicians and how this relationship impacts the audience. The major parties have great faith in the media but fear its power. Yet ever since Lazarsfeld’s seminal study (1944), it has been clear that mass media do not change people’s voting intentions and at best have a reinforcement effect. It is not the transmission of news that counts, it is the selective construction of images and events which are influenced by the negotiations and conflicts that occur within the news organisation. Audience studies acknowledge the potential for a “boomerang effect” in the communication of propaganda and ideas where the intended meaning can be inverted by members of the audience. Kiosis found evidence between the number of cynical stories in the news media and the lack of public confidence in the press. Others believe there is a restoration of substance occurring in political communication. According to research on radio talk shows, people do ask questions that are “overwhelmingly issues oriented”, obliging politicians to offer more information about their policies. Media images shape people’s view of the world and their deepest values. Politicians need to understand their audience to effectively use the media to communicate their messages.

One audience tool used extensively by the media and political parties is opinion polls. What the polls say is often the major news reported by the media during an election campaign. Media polls on voting intentions and leadership approval have become a deeply entrenched characteristic of election contests. The 1990 Australian Election Survey found that 60 per cent of voters take “some” or “quite a lot” of notice in polls. Polls generate their own momentum and can contribute to a “horserace” style reporting of election. Critics of polls say these horserace reports frame campaign news coverage as a contest and encourage journalists to avoid qualitative coverage of issues and leaders. Nevertheless, they remain an important part of the political process and provide a voice for the public in the political debate. Even if only as a symbolic gesture, they convey the impression of an involved electorate and at their best actively contribute to the public agenda.

Not all media content has this sense of public good. A worrying trend is that stories of apparent interest to the public have replaced stories in the public interest. The global first-tier media firms act as a cartel whose sole goal is to seek commercial gain in a congenial political and economic environment. In order to serve their shareholders these conglomerates are given over to entertainment and devote only a small part of their content to public affairs. New LA Times editor James O’Shea who is battling against shrinking budgets and falling circulations, recognises the problem when he said “we need to tell readers more about Barack Obama and less about Britney Spears”. The challenge therefore is for media to find ways of drawing in audiences for Obama as much as for Britney. Channel Seven’s director of news Peter Meakin believes the only way media can successfully cover political issues in the future is through interactivity. This means campaigning on public issues using advice segments, audience kits and advocating political activism. The difficulty for media is to actively engage their audiences without losing audience share.

Disaffected audiences are turning to newer media for more democratic access. Public access broadcasting fulfils an important function for democracy by providing a forum for citizen views and opinions. There is evidence to suggest that community broadcasting offers a sense of empowerment to audiences and creates an environment where community voices can be heard. According to Hartley, public broadcasting breaks down the distinction between viewing and program maker and provides social groups of all kinds a chance to communicate not only to their own communities but also to larger publics. The Internet is also capable of returning power to audiences. Wheeler saw the Internet as nothing less than an “electronic landscape for a reinvented civil society”. In 1997 he predicted millions of people would adopt the technology and engage in political discourse without interference of governments, regulators and owners. And to some degree, the rise of the blogosphere has borne him out. With almost 8 million blogs worldwide by March 2005, they have gained increasing audience size and political influence, especially in the US. A 2004 PANPA bulletin report cited Fairfax research which found 83 per cent of Australian respondents visited a news website at least twice a week. But there is no simple theory that can be used to anticipate how people will use the new services of the Internet or how society might be affected as a result. Montgomery believes the new digital media can play a significant role in developing thoughtful and active citizens. Audiences appropriate media output for their own purposes which they discuss and subvert to produce their own interpretations. In the online world, the way people access news is evolving. Use of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and web-feeds is encouraging the use of “personalised news” which has the potential to increase public engagement in news coverage by encouraging citizens to become better informed about current events. This tailoring practice is not without its dangers if people choose only the information that reinforces their beliefs and values. But the overwhelming impression is that public broadcasting and the Internet have re-invigorated a sense of public participation in the media.

There has been a long interlocking history between media and its citizen audience. The power of journalism has long shaped public policy. Active audiences engaged with the material to enhance their sense of citizenship. But as the quality of the news has declined, so has citizen participation. This has not been helped by the contest of power between the media and their sources. The media has an important agenda-setting power which politicians react to, and attempt to circumvent. Audience considerations are not well served by this battle between media and political players. Audiences consider opinion polls important but they also have a tendency to reduce the quality of political debate. Meanwhile the rampant commercialisation of media is reducing the quantity of political debate. As a result audiences are turning to newer, independent media to express their opinions. Out on the independent fringes, forums such as public broadcasting and Internet allow the citizen audience to speak loud and clear. The challenge for corporate media is to heed this voice.

A comparison of audience research in two participatory media

Alternative media such as community broadcasting and blogging play an important role promoting diversity in the Australian mediascape. However participatory media have also blurred the demarcation lines between journalists and audiences. Detailed knowledge of their audience is required to understand where the line is drawn in these fields of citizen journalism. To that end, this paper examines recent Australian audience research using two groundbreaking case studies in broadcasting and the Internet. The first is “Empowering audiences: transformative processes in Australian community broadcasting” (2007) by Michael Meadows, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart and Kerrie Foxwell. The second is An Nguyen’s “Journalism in the wake of participatory publishing” (2006) about the rise of blogging. Community broadcasting has a poor research tradition despite attracting large audiences. The industry suffers in relation to its richer commercial cousin. Its stakeholders want to use the research results to justify government spending. In the case of community television, there is the added problem of the move to digital. The research also attempts to show the importance of the industry to Indigenous groups. The qualitative research methodology supported all these objectives. The second case study examines the rise of participatory publishing, mainly blogging. This media sector has exploded in the last few years. The sudden rise in blogging has important implications for journalist educators. Our understanding of the role of the audience has also struggled to keep up with online developments. The research found that Australia is slow to embrace the new trends in comparison to other parts of the world. There is also resistance from established corporate media who fear losing audience share to newer players. A comparison of the two media case studies shows similarities in terms of the way the community broadcasting and blogging industries attempt to use their influence. They are both about empowerment, innovation and ensuring a continuation of alternative voices.

Community broadcasting is a large but under-appreciated alternative voice. Community radio is a highly innovative medium, provides skilled personnel to the commercial sector and has always been important in developing new forms, types and types of radio. The ability to imagine an audience is critical to the processes of radio production however the field of community broadcasting suffers a notable absence of audience research. To that end, the researchers conducted the first national qualitative study of the Australian community broadcasting sector in 2007. Their objective was to reveal some of the ways audiences use local radio and television as a cultural resource. This is important because community broadcasting achieves large and diverse audiences.

However the industry has a problem gaining attention from decision-makers. Although community radio licences vastly outnumber commercial licences they are dwarfed by the financial clout of the latter. The community sector has an annual budget of $51 million compared to the estimated $12 billion industry that is commercial radio. Yet despite the disparity, it is the community sector which is far more diverse, producing more local content, news, music and culture than its richer cousins. Margaret Simons described community broadcasting as the “most diverse if not the most polished sector in the Australian media”. Whereas the commercial media depend upon advertising revenue, the community broadcasting sector survives on subscriptions, donations, sponsorship and fundraising. Minority groups tend to be marginalised because of the commercial imperatives in media production. The aim of the researchers was to uncover evidence that could convince legislators of the worth of the marginalised community broadcasting media.

The people with most to gain from the research were the stakeholders in the community broadcasting industry. The research was paid for by an ARC Linkage Grant funded jointly by the Australian Research Council and the federal Department of Communication, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) through the Community Broadcasting Foundation. There was also ‘in-kind’ support from other industry stakeholders including the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia, and Indigenous, ethnic, and print handicapped media groups. Institutional audience research has a close relationship with the politics of power and competition for market share and is tied up with the strategies and plans of stakeholders to prosecute their own agendas. All of the community broadcasting stakeholders expected the research to justify funding of their constituency.

In addition, the community television (CTV) industry has a particular problem which it hopes the survey results will help solve. CTV has been in a policy limbo since the early 1990s and has so far been frozen out of the move to the digital spectrum. The industry has been losing tens of thousands of viewers annually as digital set-top boxes prevent easy access to its analogue signals. The research results were announced just months after a parliamentary enquiry said CTV would die unless the Government set aside digital broadcasting spectrum for community television. It also follows the 2007 annual budget which gave no money to CTV to help it upgrade to digital. One aim therefore of the research is to put the move to digital back on the government agenda. That pressure will now be applied to the new Labor Government in the year ahead.

The research also monitored the Indigenous community broadcasting scene. Aboriginal Australians have longed pressed the view that electronic media, especially radio, is a vital resource for them given their widespread lack of literacy. However Meadows has noted elsewhere difficulties of suspicion and trust in researching Indigenous issues. To get around this requires careful fieldwork incorporating the perspectives of those studied. To this end, the group invited listeners to call into the radio show “TalkBlack” as well as conducting focus groups and attending community cultural events across the country. The field research confirmed that audiences see Indigenous radio and television as “essential services”. Community broadcasting emerged as an important public space for Indigenous culture.

To help the decision-makers, the researchers were keen to explore why community broadcasting attracts significant audiences. They decided on a qualitative approach using focus groups and interviews. In their words the approach “enable(s) a deeper understanding of chosen environments. However as an example of the shift towards a textual treatment of audience media readings, the approach is not without problems, particularly due to its reliance on unmediated observable truths of experience. The audience research model chosen was the “medium audience” where audiences are identified by the choice of a particularly medium. The researchers decided against the quantitative method of the ‘representative sample’ and instead used a ‘theoretical sample’ aimed at extending the range of thinking about the subject matter. They conducted focus groups in a number of languages to get ethnic radio feedback. This approach enabled a deeper understanding of the complexities of the audience environment.

While community broadcasting blossoms in Australia, it still pales in comparison to the explosive rise of the online media. The second case study chosen for analysis is An Nguyen’s paper which concentrates on the rise of Participatory Publishing (hereafter called PP) and its implications for journalism and audiences. As consumers seek more news from different sources, journalism will undergo changes as it seeks to accommodate fragmenting audiences. Nguyen defines PP as the act of a citizen or citizens collecting and disseminating information in order to provide independent and accurate information. Examples of PP include weblogs, email lists, bulletin boards, online forums, chat rooms and collaborative publishing websites. The vast range of easy-to-use tools has given every citizen the potential to be a reporter. However tangible evidence of the contribution of blogs to mainstream journalism remains scarce. Nguyen’s objective was to study the health of this growing sector and the implications of news as a mode of popular expression.

Nguyen was also keen to encourage debate among journalistic educators about those implications. He makes the case that journalism education would benefit from embracing PP both in theory and practice. At the time of the research, An Nguyen was a Ph D student studying public adoption and social impact of online news at the University of Queensland. His research was funded by a federal government International Postgraduate Research Scholarship. Nguyen now teaches journalism part-time at the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology so he does have a vested interest in the research outcome. Nevertheless, his point about journalism educators embracing PP is well made as the Internet continues its apparently inexorable growth.

The timing of the research coincided with an exponential increase in PP. Blogging is the most pervasive form of PP and the numbers of blogs have exploded from a handful in 1999 to 14.2 million in 2005. This has created a wider range of participants in the field of journalism including those that Jay Rosen described as “the people formerly known as the audience”. These participants have the capability of performing “random acts of journalism” merely by pointing out whatever they stumble upon in their web surfing. In this audience-sender model, communication is normative and audience members are essentially participants. However critics of news media assert that journalists are unaware of their audiences’ real interests. Research has shown that over a third of all Australian journalists reported having their copy changed in the newsroom to increase audience appeal. Journalists also frequently complain they have limited access to demographic data and readership survey information. This lack of audience knowledge is as much a problem for online journalism as it is the more traditional forms of print and broadcasting.

An Nguyen attempted to address this with his ambitious audience research methodology. His goal was a quantitative national survey of online news using as stratified sample of Australian addresses. 790 people responded to the survey. The research was originally conducted in 2004 as part of the first national survey of online news consumption in Australia. The researchers sent a questionnaire aimed at eliciting data about their online news activities. The study is an example of uses and gratifications research in that it posits audiences as active agencies using media for their own purposes and pleasures. The question they were attempting to answer was whether people were attracted to online news because of its exclusive technological features or was it simply due to the fact it was offered without charge. The study found that news and information exchange websites remain a minor source of news with poor knowledge of blogs in the wider community. This outcome is corroborated in other studies which found that audiences overwhelmingly prefer to access websites of established media to source their online news. Nguyen blames the established media for hindering the power of PP with practices such as compulsory online registration. Strategic alliances between global transnational corporations dominate the Internet producing a homogeneity of information aimed at middle-class western audiences. The apparent poor reception of Australian blogs is in stark contrast to its success in other parts of the world. In South Korea the ohmynews.com site had over 40,000 citizen reporters as of late 2005. In the same year, the US Pew Centre reported that 32 million Americans read blogs which compares quite well with the country’s 50 million weekly newspaper readers. Nguyen’s research shows there is a long way to go before the Australian industry achieves this level of relative strength.

But Nguyen also admits the industry is vibrant, something it shares in common with the community broadcasting sector. Both sectors are part of the gift economy. This is defined as people giving their best thoughts free or for very little reward. They rely on participants to freely donate their time and enthusiasm. It is critical then, that the overarching theme of both case studies is the issue of empowerment and a sense of agency. Both studies are concerned with negotiating media meaning and are more interested in what audiences do with media rather than what media does to audiences. While the ultimate object is different for each case study, they are both third generation constructionist view of audience research. The main focus is not audience reception but rather to gain a grasp of contemporary media culture particularly about its role in everyday life. With mainstream journalists being denounced as little more than “process workers manipulating information for commercial purposes”, alternative media can shape a significant part of that culture. What Hartley wrote about the alternative press in the 1980s holds true today for community broadcasting and blogs: they have turned away from the mass and seek to build counter-hegemonic consciousness in specific cultural and political constituencies. The media has been constructed as central to the experience of living and full participation in a mediated social sphere is conditional on access and use of media technologies. Both case studies chosen address gaps in the knowledge of what audiences do with participatory media. They are both on the ‘pro audience’ end of McQuail’s audience research spectrum, that is they take the perspective and ‘side’ of the audience and are about “people seeking to satisfy their media needs”. For both media the research is showing the biggest problem preventing empowerment is the distribution system. In an era of concentrated global news ownership, maintaining access to these alternative voices has never been more important.

The two case studies have added greatly to our knowledge of Australian participatory media. The community broadcasting sector can use the rich qualitative nature of the evidence to both cement its place in the national culture and also lobby for a seat at the digital table. The participatory publishing industry faces slightly different challenges as it copes with exponential growth. The journalism education model needs to adapt to the new world as do the corporate giants of the old media. But thanks to the vibrancy of its participants and the strength of the audiences, the future looks bright for both community broadcasting and participatory publishing. The two case studies have provided a blueprint of empowerment for the future.

Magic Bullets v Encoding /Decoding: A comparison of media research theories

This post will define and place in historical context two media research theories: the “magic bullet” (“hypodermic”) model and the encoding/decoding model. It will then compare the theories in terms of their treatment of the audience and their relationship to power structures.

The earliest media research occurred in the 1920s and reflected the insecurities and paranoias of the time. In response to the pessimistic “mass society thesis” of the Frankfurt School, early researchers believed communication worked by injecting powerful messages into the minds of passive audiences. Theorists saw how both sides in the First World War used propaganda to such great effect that it acquired “a reputation of omnipotence”. The evolution of propaganda in radio and cinema encouraged Laswell and others to view mass media as having a powerful influence on public opinion. According to this notion, the media fired off “magic bullets” which merely had to hit their target to produce the desired effect. The theory was also called the “hypodermic model” which imagined the media as syringes able to “inject” narcotic propaganda directly into the veins of the audience. But by the 1940s and 1950s, researchers were beginning to rebuff the “pessimistic” thesis saying it proposed too powerful and unmediated an impact by the media. They began to look at the active role of the audience in the making of meaning.

By the 1970s, alternative ideas were taking shape which placed communication in a wider socio-cultural context. Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ model emerged out of a British semiotic and cultural studies approach to media studies. Semiotics is a textual analysis of how meaning is created in language, non verbal codes and cultural “signs”. Audiences were no longer “empty vessels” to pour meaning into, they were considered culturally formed and situated. Hall called the phases of his model “moments” which he defined in Marxist terms as “production, circulation, distribution /consumption, reproduction”. Each “moment” played a role in the manufacture of meaning. Audiences could accept, negotiate, or reject the media texts they were presented with. Researchers now had a model to show what audiences did with media as opposed to what media did with audience.

A key difference, therefore, between the hypodermic and encoding/decoding models is how they view the role of the audience. Effects theorists believed that audiences were passive and culture could be imposed from above by an elite group of skilled manipulators. While the hypodermic theory has a psychological plausibility, it fails to take into account that communication is not just about sending messages, it is about the sharing of meaning. Hall’s model offers better insights into the way culture operates by demonstrating how various actors change communication at each step in the process. The model emphasises the discourse rather than the participants and examines how each of the “passage of forms” in the process flow provide meaning to the message. Encoding/decoding encouraged research to move away from media effects towards audience talk and increased focus on communities, particularly marginalised ones. Yet although the hypodermic theory is now academically discredited, it continues to have resonance in the wider community especially in the context of violent media effects on children. It also underpins the one-dimensional nature of the media’s own ratings measurement research.

The hypodermic and encoding/decoding models are also subtly different in their treatment of power structures. The simplistic linear Shannon-Weaver model of communication which fits the earlier theory is superseded by Hall’s more complex diagram of frameworks producing meaning which are mediated by the discursive elements of the broadcast programme. Whereas the earlier theory proposed a simplistic but all powerful media, the encoding/decoding model suggested a sophisticated hegemony existed which operated through popular culture. Hall demonstrated how the “professional codes” of the media integrate with the cultural and social order to become a bulwark of the power structure. Hall showed that power in communication is more likely to be transmitted by signification than by syringe.

Rating the ratings: a study of TV audience measurement

Ratings are the central means of mass audience measurement for the television industry. This post will define what ratings mean and then examine positives and negative aspects of ratings use. It will examine critical US research in the 1990s and conclude with a discussion of the ratings transition debate in Australia earlier this decade.

Ratings provide a quantitative measure of how many homes or people are viewing a program, advertisements, a station or the media itself. They are based on an audience snapshot using both geographical (multi-stage cluster) and characteristic (stratified) sampling techniques. Because of their feedback element, ratings largely control what is broadcast. The television industry uses audience ratings information to justify its broadcasting service performance as well as the cost of advertising spots and sponsorship deals. The ratings approach is based on “exposure” which measures a single audience behaviour: “open eyes facing a medium”. When counted and analysed, exposures allow the industry to predict audiences and pre-sell slots to advertisers. Ratings for a programme are compared against others in the same point in time to determine audience share. Ratings, therefore, create a manageable image of the public for television executives. It is the apparently neutral form of numbers that invest the ratings with so much power.

But there are issues with this blunt approach. Because ratings drive advertising revenue, broadcasters tended to treat audiences as commodities on the basis of their viewing consumption. The economic system of commercial television depends on the extraction of surplus value from an exploited audience. The pressure is therefore on broadcasting decision makers to pander to mass markets in order to continually win large portions of the audience share. Ratings are kept high by sticking to proven formulas. Therefore risk taking is rare because radically different programming may shift audiences in the opposite direction than intended. This means that specialist interests such as the poor, the aged, the intelligentsia and children are not catered for by commercial broadcasters because they know will get more advertising revenue from mass audiences. As a result, innovative programming remains the preserve of publicly funded broadcasters who are not as bound to ratings.

Audience ratings have been criticised from a qualitative perspective. Because exposure is the only data recorded for ratings, the industry only cares about the numbers involved in tuning in, staying tuned, changing channels and turning off. No other audience behaviour is relevant. This means ratings do not capture whether a programme is interesting to its audience. It also means that low ratings problems are generally solved by programming decisions rather than by audience research. Ratings, in effect, “take the side” of the broadcasters. Audience ratings measure only if the message is received and do not capture whether it has been registered or internalised. Broadcasters are not interested in the “lived reality behind the ratings”. The only problem that matters for broadcasters is how to get the audience to tune in.

In the 1990s, researchers such as Eileen Meehan and Ien Ang began to criticise the way audiences were manipulated by the ratings. Meehan noted that intellectuals simply didn’t count in decision-making due to their tiny numbers. TV programming reflected the “forced choice behaviours” of the masses. Ang argued the media didn’t want to know about their audience, but merely prove there was one. Ratings produce a ‘map’ of the audience which provides broadcasters and advertisers with neatly arranged and convenient information. This allows the industry to take decisions about the future what Ang calls a sense of “provisional certainty”. There inevitably follows the streamlining of television output into formulaic genres, the plethora of spin-offs and the rigid placing of programmes into fixed time slots. In a competitive environment each competitor will make its product more like the others rather than taking a chance on producing something different. The result is a remorseless repetitiveness at the heart of the American TV schedule.

The Australian broadcasting industry has also endured controversy as a result of ratings issues. In the early 2000s the apparent certainty of measurement provided by ratings was undermined by a change in the ratings regime. In 2001, OzTAM (and its Italian supplier ATR) won a lucrative contract to replace incumbent provider ACNielsen to provide Australian metropolitan TV ratings. Despite both parties using the same “people meter” technology in the six month overlap period, major discrepancies emerged between the two providers’ data. The discrepancies led to widespread unease in the $5 billion Australian TV industry. ATR boss Muir said the discrepancy was because that ratings were sample-based estimates and therefore subject to sampling and statistical error. But advertisers did not want to hear about sampling errors or issues with “psychological makeup” that a rating system cannot capture. What they wanted was certainty for their business decisions and demanded an unrealistic 100 per cent ratings accuracy. Eventually the two measurement systems came closer together to ease the fears of the advertisers. Nonetheless the controversy exposed the gulf between the questionable accuracy of ratings and the absolute faith put in the system by advertisers.