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

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

The tenuous relationship between the national organizations and the stations was further strained by President Richard Nixon's assault upon public television. He had inherited public television from the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, under which the 1967 act was passed as part of the "Great Society." Nixon's attempts to undermine the non-commercial system, well documented by scholars (Stone, 1985), influenced the course of audience research for years to follow. The White House assault, an effort to weaken PBS in the guise of enhancing localism, was launched with a speech to the 1971 NAEB convention by Clay Whitehead, director of the Office of Telecommunications Policy. Seeking to drive a wedge between the stations and PBS, Whitehead linked public television's use of audience research with commercialism. He asked the station managers in the audience:

   ... is it you or PBS who has been taking the networks' approach and
   measuring your success in rating points and audience? You check the Harris
   poll and ARB survey and point to increases in viewership. Once you're in
   the rating game, you want to win. You become a supplement to the commercial
   networks and do their things a bit better in order to attract the audience
   that wants more quality in program content (Whitehead, 1971, p. 4).

Whitehead's speech resonated with some of the station managers, especially those at university-based stations who were already uneasy with the notion of programming for mass audiences. While Nixon's assault was ultimately blunted by changes in public broadcasting's organizational structure and the distraction of the Watergate scandal, the fallout from Whitehead's address exacerbated the mistrust many managers felt toward the national organizations' audience research initiatives. This antipathy would last for years to come. Nonetheless, ratings data were instrumental for CPB and PBS in making the case to Congress for continued federal succor in a hostile political climate. They needed to demonstrate that significant numbers of people were watching and, sensitive to charges of elitism, that the audience represented a cross-section of the population.

On Not Counting Housewives in Scarsdale

The early PTV studies provided the industry some rough measures of audience size and composition, but, just as did educational broadcasters, the Ford Foundation wanted more qualitative indicators. In April 1971, foundation officials, prompted by Fred Friendly, the former CBS News president then advising the foundation on television issues, convened ten prominent academics for a "Public Television Audience Research Working Seminar." Their charge was presented by Friendly:

   ... we would like to count the house but not down to the last seat; we'd
   like to know who is there but not down to the last 35-year old housewife in
   Scarsdale; we'd like to know if the money that goes into, for instance, The
   Great American Dream Machine is well spent; if the PTV audience changes;
   how PTV can attract more people; what the audience is getting out of it;
   and what use they make of it (Public television audience research, n.d.).