Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Executives, like creators, want it both ways. They want to be seen as champions of art, and yet they want to justify their anti-conservative discrimination by citing the power of the marketplace. The most eloquent example of this phenomenon was Grant Tinker, former head of NBC. In his autobiography, Tinker in Television, he mused, “I have considerable impatience with the maximum profit fixation of the current network owners.”25

  It was the same Grant Tinker, though, who continued to push the myth that executives are interested in catering to the largest audience for the greatest profit, without regard to their own politics or personal biases. In his speech to NBC’s affiliates in 1983, he averred, “Instead of running a boutique which attracts only people with the same taste as ours, we’re running a giant department store, which has everyone in the country as a potential customer. If we’re doing our job well, we’re appealing to a great diversity of tastes—not just our own. . . . Our job is to get all of America into our tent, and we’re going to be doing that with programs that have great popular appeal.”26

  This is simply untrue. Executives and creators have little interest in great general appeal. They’re far more interested in programs with specific appeal—and with specific viewpoints.

  Both creators and executives conveniently cite the market argument when it suits them, and discard it when it doesn’t. It’s a convenient scapegoat for abdication of broadcast responsibility. Boiled down to two words, the market argument in the television world is the Nuremberg Defense—creators claim they are not to blame for any political or social content in their programming, since they’re ultimately taking orders from the audience. Of course, ask those same creators if they’d be willing to write a sequel to a racist film like Birth of a Nation if they knew it would get a guaranteed thirty share, and they’d turn you down flat (and rightly so).

  In the end, politics on television isn’t driven solely by the market. It’s the politics of those who write, create, produce, and distribute television that shapes the political content on television. The market argument, in a nutshell, is post facto justification by those who desperately want to maintain the industry’s cliquish status quo. The market doesn’t want liberal shows any more than it wants conservative shows. It wants entertaining shows. But the creators and executives want only liberal entertaining shows.

  HOLES IN THE MARKET MYTH

  Nonetheless, the market argument continues to carry weight, because television is clearly a hugely successful industry. It’s difficult to contend that liberal programming has brought television to some sort of market impasse when the networks and cable channels continue to rake in billions of dollars.

  So where’s the hole in the market argument?

  Actually, there are four major holes.

  First and foremost, television isn’t a traditional free market. At least not where the audience is concerned. The proof is in the pudding. How many shows have audiences loved, only to see them canceled? And how many have audiences hated, only to see them run forever? There’s a reason for that: television’s businessmen don’t really care about the viewers. They care about whether they can use the viewers to make money from advertisers. Even the advertisers, though, aren’t fully informed consumers in the traditional model. Advertisers have to gauge where to spend their advertising dollars by measuring audience numbers, but the numbers are often skewed. And those numbers are then funneled not to the advertisers directly, but to advertising agencies, which help allocate ad dollars—and in which corruption runs rampant. The bottom line: there are several layers of disconnect between those who spend the money (advertisers), those they are seeking to reach (audiences), and those who actually rake in the dough (television creators and executives).

  Second, television producers and distributors are not traditional free market actors—they collude with each other. With the help of governmental regulation and an unspoken agreement not to target each others’ narrow-casted audiences, television’s powers-that-be create a diversity of programming without real competition. If you want to watch a home improvement show, you’ll probably have to do it through the Scripps Network (Home and Garden Television, Do It Yourself Network). If you want to watch sports, you’ll do it through ESPN and its myriad spinoff channels. There’s generally nowhere else to turn.

  Third, the market argument assumes that the producers involved are attempting to cater to the broadest possible market in their search for profits. This is pure bunk. Broadcasting is out. Narrowcasting is in. Rather than producers catering to vast swaths of consumers, producers have attempted to shape a hierarchy of consumers to whom they wish to cater. In other words, television’s creators and executives have spent the last fifty years defining for themselves what their audience is, rather than their audience defining for the creators and executives precisely what they want to watch. That allows television honchos to program politically, get low ratings, and claim audience victory while doing so. It also leads to the liberalization of television content in general.

  Finally, there is an unspoken assumption that viewers will turn the channel if they don’t like what they’re watching. That assumes that viewers have something to turn to. They don’t. Programming is largely homogeneous when it comes to politics. Incredibly enough, the evidence suggests that when viewers are given the choice to pick more conservative product, they do so—believe it or not, conservatives’ viewing patterns are far more predictive of television success than liberals’ viewing patterns. If the television creators had any brains, they’d be looking to please Joe Sixpack rather than Joe Biden.

  HOLE NUMBER ONE: TV DOESN’T MEET THE CONSUMER MODEL

  When creators and executives tell us that they are merely catering to the market, we assume they’re talking about us, the watching audience.

  They’re not. They couldn’t care less about us.

  The true television audience is advertisers. They’re the ones who pay the bills. Audiences don’t pay programmers directly—only advertisers do that. Audiences only matter in an indirect way; since advertisers are interested in getting as many eyeballs on their commercials as possible, programmers target audiences, then sell those audience numbers to advertisers.

  This can still work under ideal market conditions. In a dream scenario, advertisers are concerned only with reaching the highest number of viewers, and television provides them a direct outlet for doing so. In that case, everyone’s interests would coincide, since advertisers would only buy advertising on shows that garnered the most viewers. Think about the Super Bowl: advertisers are willing to pay millions of dollars to networks because the Super Bowl draws tens of millions of viewers at one time. Audiences aren’t important because they’re interested in watching the Super Bowl—they’re important because they watch the commercials during the time-outs.

  The dream scenario would depend on two basic assumptions. First, it would require perfect information—audiences would have to be effectively measured and their viewing habits efficiently calculated. Second, the dream scenario would require that audience information be conveyed in a timely manner to potential advertisers, who make rational cost-benefit analyses.

  In reality, such informational flow is hampered by a couple of barriers: the ratings system itself, and the advertising agencies.

  Television ratings are handled by the Nielsen Company. The Nielsen Company has two ways it measures ratings: the normal ratings, and the “sweeps.” Normal ratings are taken in top markets on a regular basis. During sweeps, samples are taken in the 210 viewing markets. The purpose of sweeps week is to provide ratings for local advertisers, who must know how many people in their city or area are watching a given program. National advertisers can base their advertising rates on the general ratings, since they’re aiming at the broader market.

  In local markets, Nielsen employs the archaic “diary system.” The diary system works like this: Nielsen’s sample viewers receive a piece of paper on which
they are asked to write down what they’re watching as they watch it. “Keeping your diary is very easy,” read one 2009 Nielsen letter to a Nielsen participant. “When your TV is on, please enter programs as you watch them. . . . This will only take a few minutes a day.”27 The problems with the diary system are obvious: People forget to fill in the diary, people purposefully misreport what they watch (who wants to admit to watching Secret Diary of a Call Girl?), and people misremember what they did watch. People can also be paid to write down shows they don’t actually watch. While major markets now employ more accurate and automated ratings systems, small towns still use the diaries.28

  The diaries have historically had a massive impact when it comes to sweeps week. Networks program their big new programs so that their ratings will jump during sweeps week; meanwhile, local markets have a huge say as to which shows stay on the air based on their ratings during sweeps week. Since the local markets all use diaries (or at least did up until 2009), the numbers are deeply questionable at best. Les Moonves questioned the diaries/sweeps dominance back in 2000: “It is such an antiquated way of doing business. On the edge of a technical revolution, we’re using a system that belongs to the dinosaurs. It’s ludicrous.”29 In late November 2010, the Media Rating Council, an independent organization maintaining ratings standards, revoked its accreditation of Nielsen in the 154 remaining diary-only markets. According to Broadcasting & Cable, the problem sprang from Nielsen’s decision to stop sampling people via traditional phone lines, which have become obsolete, and to start sampling people based on address. Resultant sample sizes were too small to be representative.30

  Nielsen has historically been slow to adapt to changing technology, as the continued use of diaries suggests; it took them years to catch on to the effect of TiVo, which time-shifted viewing of certain programs; it took them years to catch on to the fact that college students away from home watch television (they used to measure only home television viewership); and now they have been slow to adapt to the rise of Internet viewing.

  There are other flaws in the system, too. Even Nielsen’s electronic monitoring devices require users to hit an individual button on their remotes that show Nielsen who is watching the television. If a family of four is watching a show, for example, Dad, Mom, Billy, and Jane all have to hit their individual buttons to show Nielsen that they’re watching. This adds back in the element of self-reporting that makes the diary system so flawed. Furthermore, Nielsen doesn’t measure how many commercials are actually being watched during a particular program—it measures how many people are watching a particular program. As everybody knows, you wait until the commercials come on before grabbing a beer from the fridge or hitting the john. Nielsen doesn’t measure that.

  A huge problem with the Nielsen ratings is the problem with every survey: self-selection. Nielsen creates a statistically valid sample and then solicits involvement by those chosen—but many people who are selected simply refuse to participate. The “response rate” to solicitation is egregiously low in many cases. The diary response rate can run south of 30 percent in some cities during sweeps. “It’s become a big problem,” Jack Loftus, chief communications officer of Nielsen communications, said in 2000.31 Local people meters (LPMs), essentially small monitoring boxes which require viewers to type in their identity while viewing, only get a slightly higher cooperation rate; in Miami’s roll-out in October 2008, for example, there was just a 45.4 percent response rate, which was a massive increase over their previous set meter/diary response rate of 24.5 percent.32 When it comes to consistent ratings using people meters, the response rate as of 2003 had risen to 40.6 percent.33 Such percentages do not provide fully representative samples.

  Even more problematic is who self-selects. Historically, those who have complied with Nielsen’s requests have been “younger, better educated . . . cooperators were disproportionately inclined toward the . . . most irreverent, politically liberal, and convention-subverting programs on the air. . . .”34 The same may hold true today, particularly since conservatives tend to populate rural and non-major urban areas that use the diary system, meaning their response rate is even lower than normal. In other words, it is more than possible that Nielsen statistically oversamples political liberals.

  Even if the information gathered by Nielsen were perfect (and we can assume that they are always trying to improve their product), there is no guarantee that the information provided by Nielsen is taken at face value by advertisers. Television advertising buyers are the middlemen between television networks and advertisers, and they have a cozy relationship with the network executives. They have an interest in overbuying television time, and on occasion, they even receive kickbacks from particular networks. Their clients—advertisers—know little about the business of advertising and trust them implicitly, which is why they hire them. The Nielsen statistics are highly fungible, being susceptible to manipulation by media buyers—a media buyer may suggest that an advertiser look at a subset of viewers rather than the entire viewing audience, for example, if a show has poor ratings but the media buyer has a stake in the network running the show. There is a good deal of leeway for misbehavior here, all of which distorts the supposedly perfect market.35

  In fact, the history of television demonstrates that the cloudy nature of the numbers, disguised by their supposed exactitude, has been used consistently by the television industry in its never-ending quest for both cash and liberal programming. That history is an amazing tale of PR genius, informational manipulation, and outright snake oil salesmanship. It has shaped our entertainment and our culture in ways we can only begin to comprehend.

  HOW TELEVISION TWISTED AUDIENCE NUMBERS

  Audience numbers didn’t start as an excuse for leftism. Early on, executives were chiefly concerned with grabbing the most eyeballs. David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, quickly discovered what was later termed Sarnoff’s law: The value of any radio or television network lay in the number of consumers it reached. Radio was only valuable if it got listeners; TV was only valuable if it got viewers. Executives aimed at the audience more broadly, avoiding narrowcasting at all costs. Pat Weaver of NBC said that television’s greatest challenge would be to stay away from the precedent set by the movie industry: “We must beware of the terrible example of the movies, who went for a regular part of the whole audience and tailored a product for them so completely that motion picture going became a minority experience in American life.” The goal, said Weaver, was “to reach everyone.”36

  Programming reflected the attempt of the networks to touch as many viewers as possible. Popular shows included rural-slanted shows like Westerns, which were cheap to produce and immensely popular (in 1959, there were twenty-eight Westerns on the air, about a quarter of all primetime programming),37 and quiz shows. Successful shows ranged from The Beverly Hillbillies to Gunsmoke to I Love Lucy—all of them geared toward family audiences. Anybody—mom, pop, son, or daughter—could plop down in front of the tube and know that the programming would likely appeal to them.

  While Sarnoff at NBC was pushing the notion that viewers were the target audience, Bill Paley at CBS had hit upon a different, more sophisticated idea: target the sponsors, not the audience. Whereas Sarnoff focused largely on garnering the largest number of listeners and viewers, Paley focused on grabbing affiliates and advertisers. That’s where the money was. Paley forged brilliant business strategies based on Paley’s law, and CBS began to grow rapidly.38

  In the beginning, Paley’s law and Sarnoff’s law yielded the same results: advertiser dollars were directed toward the shows with the most viewers. But at ABC, the executives took notice of Paley’s law and realized one crucial fact that had escaped both Paley and Sarnoff: even if you didn’t have viewers, if you could snooker the advertisers into thinking you had viewers, you could make a bundle. Advertisers could be separated from audience numbers so long as advertisers believed that smaller, more targeted viewer groups were better than large, dispersed
viewer groups. This made sense for ABC, which lacked big stations and big numbers. ABC would have to con advertisers.

  But first, they needed the data with which to con those advertisers. In the 1950s, they got it. In that decade, ABC head of programming Ollie Treyz commissioned Dr. Paul Lazarsfeld of Columbia University to analyze television audiences. The goal: come up with a new way of capitalizing on ABC’s weak, mostly urban station roster. Lazarsfeld returned with his analysis. And ABC President Leonard Goldenson ate it up, because it provided him a selling point for advertisers.

  “The top programs at CBS and NBC, built around stars that came out of radio, appealed mostly to older audiences,” Goldenson later explained. “But this was not the audience most sought by advertisers, said Lazarsfeld. Older persons are more set in their ways and less likely, for example, to switch brands of toothpaste or laundry detergent. They are also less likely to change their television viewing habits. . . . Younger audiences, those between eighteen and forty-nine years old, are more open to change. They are more willing to turn the dial looking for something new and different.” It was too good to be true. But the good news kept on coming: “Even better, suggested Lazarsfeld, younger audiences spend more money per capita than older ones. These are the people with growing families, those who buy most of the household products which are the staples of mass-marketing. . . . Lazarsfeld recommended we go after the young audiences. We should build programs around the casts of young, virile people, he said.”39 Goldenson couldn’t have been happier.