Counting the House in Public Television: A History of Ratings Use, 1953-1980

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Fall, 1998 by Alan G. Stavitsky

Schramm, Lyle and Pool, or the other hand, summed up the rationale for their study, which rang true for much early ETV audience research:

      Educational television is costly and demanding also in human
   resources.... It would be a waste of precious commodities if all this
   expenditure and devotion were seen to be ineffective. Therefore, even at
   the cost of embarrassing idealists, it is important to have a reading on
   what educational television is accomplishing, and most particularly on what
   audiences it has and what the viewers think of it (1963, p. 19).

Their justification was reminiscent of Ohio State researcher W.W. Charters' statement at the first Institute for Education by Radio, in 1930.(5) Charters told conferees that research in educational broadcasting was important because "some time or other the broadcaster will have to prove definitely to the teacher and the superintendent and ultimately to the taxpayer that the student has received something better by the radio than he could have had through the ordinary processes of the classroom" (Charters, 1930, p. 274). Indeed, justification of tax-based or philanthropic support motivated much audience research in non-commercial broadcasting until the burden came to be borne more heavily by consumers and corporations.

However, the three studies were similar in that all were grounded in the dominant paradigm of academic communication research. Based in the effects tradition of the time, these studies constituted research intended to solve practical industrial problems, governed by Harold Lasswell's "Who says what ... ?" model of communication (Lasswell, 1948). Consideration of the production process, of network and station ownership patterns, or the cultural consequences of broadcast consumption was limited, though somewhat more pronounced in the Schramm, Lyle and Pool work. Lazarsfeld had tried briefly -- but unsuccessfully -- to bring German critical theorist Theodore Adorno into his Radio Research Project at Princeton, in an attempt to link Adorno's critical perspective to Lazarsfeld's empirical approach (Rogers, 1994, pp. 280-283; Rowland, 1983, pp. 61-63). After that foundered, Lazarsfeld returned to conducting behaviorist social research focused on industrial concerns. As will become apparent later, despite the later emergence of other communication approaches, public television remains largely wedded to this model (see Sherman, 1995).

Interconnection and the National Audience

The People Look at Educational Television represented supra-local audience research, a first step toward measuring national viewing of ETV.(6) ETV stations lacked the financial resources to establish network interconnection in the manner of their commercial counterparts; programs produced or purchased by a central facility, the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC, later known as National Educational Television, or NET), were shared through the mail (a practice referred to as "bicycling") and broadcast at widely different times. ETV stations broadcast schedules of primarily locally produced programs, most of which -- in keeping with their mission -- involved formal instruction. It was difficult, therefore, to think of a national audience for ETV in the sense of the millions of people who together watched, say, I Love Lucy or Your Show of Shows. Common carriage, the simultaneous (or nearly so) broadcast of a core schedule of programs, was required to create a truly national identity for ETV, and that required interconnection.(7)