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

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

Other forces contributed as well. Grossman's emphasis upon national advertising began to pay off in larger audiences for the stations (Carmody, 1980), and continued uncertainty over federal support in the late 1970s made station leaders increasingly aware of the need to attend to audience and corporate interests. Further, the generation of educators who founded and managed the pioneering stations was giving way to a new cohort of public broadcasting managers who had been educated more broadly as broadcasters, and for whom audience research was accepted as a fundamental management practice.

Within this context, professional market researchers took over much of the responsibility for public broadcasting audience research from the academic community. In public television a link between industry and the academy had been David LeRoy, a Florida State professor who took a leave from the university in 1976 to serve as CPB deputy director for research (LeRoy, personal communication, February 15, 1994). LeRoy was instrumental in getting academics involved in the programmers' seminars described above and in funded audience research projects (see Six experiments, 1977). Frustrated by the CPB bureaucracy, LeRoy left after one year, but eventually formed his own firm, PMN TRAC, which today is the leading source of ratings information for PTV stations. LeRoy's successors at CPB lacked academic contacts, but CPB by then had sufficient funds dedicated to research that stations and PBS could afford to pay professional market researchers, who could produce studies much faster than the academics. The demise of the NAEB in 1981 exacerbated the academics' estrangement (Avery, 1996). By the early 1980s, the mainstream, market-oriented model of audience research had taken firm hold.

Conclusion

Public television's history of audience research reflects the vagaries of funding patterns and the interests of funders, in addition to multichannel competition. Prior to the availability of federal subsidy, managers sought to satisfy their licensees, which were generally educational institutions, and philanthropies. After passage of the 1967 act, PTV leaders needed to justify their existence to Congress, as well as the Ford Foundation. Today, when federal funding accounts for, on average, only about 17 percent of public broadcasting income, the "masters" are the viewers and underwriters whose largesse supports the enterprise (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1997). Further, no longer is PTV part of a limited broadcast menu. Throw in cable and satellite competition, and it's understandable that PTV managers have adapted the way they perceive of -- and thus study -- their viewers.

This argument is illustrated by the foregoing historical episodes: the early, albeit unsophisticated, attempts to go beyond "counting the house," to measure what viewers gained from programs; The People Look at Educational Television, which attempted to gauge the social impact of the nascent industry; lobbying for PTV with ratings data during the Nixon years; lack Lyle's ambitious but abortive Public Broadcast Survey Facility project; station managers' initial resistance to the diffusion of research and PBS' missionary work; the industry's on-and-off experiments with "qualitative ratings," which are beyond the purview of this paper (see Keegan, 1980; Myrick & Keegan, 1981); and the ultimate embrace of the professional model.