Word: nielsens
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...pollsters can't seem to get together on how much television the nation's leaders and tastemakers sit still for. The Louis Harris poll has found signs of "growing disenchantment with television on the part of affluent, better-educated adult Americans," but the Nielsen rating service claims that the upper echelons are watching more than before. Perhaps they are both right. A survey by TIME correspondents shows that America's first families do watch TV, to be sure. But mainly they limit their viewing to news, public affairs and sports. Relatively few of them switch on just...
...that movies are better than ever on television but that the new television series are worse. Last week, according to the latest Nielsen survey, four of the top-rated seven programs were old films, and not a single new-show was titillating enough to crack the top ten. The first-and second-ranking shows were parts one and two of Steve McQueen's 1963 film, The Great Escape-CBS had shrewdly cut the 170-minute feature into two installments, and played them on successive nights. The rest of the leaders, in order: Bonanza (NBC), 20th Century...
...miss the point in suggesting that Dr. Alfred Kinsey's study was criticized primarily for the small sample used. A sample of 5,300, properly chosen, is ample for most purposes. Kinsey's work was criticized for exactly the same reason you say Nielsen's ratings are suspect: the respondents may not be a representative sample from the group they are supposed to represent. If the families willing to have a Nielsen recorder on the TV set are a special class, what about the men willing to discuss their private lives with Dr. Kinsey's researchers...
...upon as representing the whole. Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey's celebrated reports were criticized by statisticians not so much for their moral implications but because they made sweeping presumptions on the basis of too small a sample (in the male study, only 5,300 men provided data). The Nielsen ratings, by which television programs live or die, have been justly attacked because Nielsen recorders are necessarily hooked to the sets of those viewers willing to have a recorder-a special class by definition, whose tastes may or may not correspond with those of the unpolled millions of the total...
This is what they call in the trade a "black week," one of four each year (others: Dec. 18-24, April 17-23, June 19-25) when the viewing public is busy elsewhere, when the Nielsen people don't bother with audience ratings, and when the competing networks hold back most of their big shows. Witness...