Debate builds as 'brownout' approaches

By Dave Lindorff

   
      There’s a new wrinkle in the dispute over the lack of ethnic and racial diversity in this season’s network primetime programming, with at least one network research director claiming that Nielsen Media Research is significantly undercounting black households.
       The researcher contends that Nielsen’s 5,000 household national survey underrepresents black households by at least a percentage point. A difference of 1 percent in the sample might seem small, but it represents an 8.5 percent difference in the number of black homes counted.
       According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimates for June 1999, 12.8 percent of Americans are black. And that's a figure many experts say is probably really far too low because of the difficulty of getting people to cooperate with census takers in the lower-income urban areas where many blacks live.
   But a Nielsen spokesman confirms that the agency’s survey has a sample figure for black households that is 11.8 percent of the total, or a full percentage point below the census estimate. The spokesman defends the agency's methods, however, saying,   "We don’t use the census figures. We have our own figure for the universe of households." He also points to a difference in counting methodology: "The census counts heads. We count households."
     With the NAACP and other ethnic organizations already protesting the "whitewashing" of network programming for the fall season, the charge that black viewers are being undercounted is certain to be controversial.
       The NAACP is considering joining a "brownout" of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox that is set to kick in this coming Sunday and run for nearly two weeks, till the 24th.  The brownout is being organized by Latino groups, with support from Asian and Native American groups.
      Hazel Dukes, head of the NAACP's New York office, says, "If we’re undercounted the networks can continue to say they don’t need to respond to our requests for TV that is diverse and that reflects the diversity of our population. If they get the message that we aren’t watching, they can continue with their all-white programming, and continue to pretend we don’t exist."
        A second issue that may contribute to inaccuracy in the tracking of black family viewing patterns by Nielsen is a difference in family size. According to the Census Bureau, the average black family has 3.42 people, compared to 3.02 for white families.
     Yet Nielsen reports that larger families statistically tend to have more difficulty keeping their televisions "in tab," that is, properly tabulating viewing patterns. If anything unusual happens to a television in a given survey household--for example, if a set is left on when no one is watching, or if a set is inadvertently unplugged, that entire household unit is not counted for that day’s viewing survey. Since black families tend to be larger, critics say this means that black families tend to be out of tab more often than white families in the Nielsen survey.
      Nielsen counters that it corrects for this problem by extrapolating the viewing patterns of the in-tab households to the whole universe for that particular group of viewers. For example, if only 90 percent of black households are in tab, and 10 percent of them are tuned in to a certain program, Nielsen, for ratings purposes, will consider that 10 percent of the full 100 percent of its survey’s black households are watching that program.
    But this approach doesn’t satisfy Nielsen's critics. Says Sue Nathan, research director at McCann-Erickson and current chair of the 4As research committee:
       "The trouble is that out-of-tab households tend to have problems because they are watching more television or they have more televisions in the house. They tend to be bigger TV viewers than the houses that are in-tab."
     The out-of-tab households that get ignored by the survey, this argument goes, actually would contribute higher ratings than simply extrapolating would suggest.
       The implications of an undercount, if there is one, are significant, and vary depending on whether one looks at the buyer or seller of advertising time, or whether one is talking about advertising or programming.
      In the case of programming, a network executive at one of the major nets says, "If you are undercounting one group like blacks, which you are trying to reach, you might try too hard when you are already reaching them, and thus cause another problem."
       Conversely, a programming executive who thinks that a certain group isn’t paying much attention to a net’s scheduled programming might wrongly decide not to bother with that group in future programming.
      In the case of advertising, undercounting a group could lead a seller to underprice a program. On the other hand, McCann-Erickson’s Nathan says, "When you have undercounting it costs advertisers money. For example, if you have an advertiser who wants 100 ratings points against blacks, they will end up buying more time than they need to get there because of the undercount."
Says Joe Abruzzo, executive director for research at        Young & Rubicam:
       "It’s not much of an issue if you’re just looking within the sample to see which programs blacks are watching because the sample itself is large enough to give valid results. But if you’re trying to see what your composition is for a program, then you’re going to underestimate the size of the black audience."
     

-Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia writer.