The Nielsen Media Group System does not reflect what people want to see, Is It Fixed?

We are told that the Nielsen rating system shows what people want on TV, and therefore determines what stays on TV by influencing advertiser dollars. I would like to show that the Nielsen do not show what we want to see. By comparing it to what the market shows we want to see.

By looking at the top grossing films and their themes we can see what people will pay to go see, something advertisers should be interested in. Also all time top TV shows are not the same type of shows the Nielsen claim people want to see. They are also rarely shown on reruns. Look at the themes of what the market shows is popular, then look at the themes on the many CSI and shows about plastic surgery, or family sitcoms (with below average intelligent content, middle class characters, usually a bit subservient to female lead) currently all over TV.

If I wanted to control the agenda of what is on TV, I would simply corrupt the Nielsen , then let the advertisers funding put on TV the things I wanted. I suggest this be examined, and researched.

All-Time USA Box office www.imdb.com...
1. Titanic - No violence, Strong common class, smart, self sacrificing, hero and a love story
2. Star Wars - Attack against Imperial empire using spiritual force of light
3. Shrek 2 - No violence, common people oppressed by a king class note the commoners are animals.
4. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial - No Violence people coming together to help outsider to get free from government
5. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace Hype
6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest - Standing against authority, and those that are corrupt through theft
7. Spider-Man - Average person becoming strong hero and defending women he loves, villain DOD scientist.
8. Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the sith - Democracy overthrown by a dark empire of evil, and how people turn to darkness
9. The Lord of the Rings: - The Return of the King People banding together to fight the evil eye and its army of corrupted souls, the common man discarding the ring of power, throwing it back to the fire from whence it came. The return of the true king that lives among the people and claims "this day does not belong to one man but to all"
10. Spider-Man 2 - Hero questions if he should stand and use his talent to help others
11. The Passion of the Christ - The story of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to save us all.
12. Jurassic Park - A few people claim that corporations should not mess with being God, then have to fight the monster created by the greedy corporation.
13. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - two hobbits struggle to defeat the pull of the ring of power, two others rally an army of ancient trees to destroy the corruption and war machinery being built for conquest. Men and elves make a last stand in Helms deep against an army corrupted by evil leader(orks were elves turned into corrupt beasts)
14. Finding Nemo - No violence, sea life helping and caring for others
15. Spider-Man 3 - didn't see it

All time Top 20 TV we are shown. Very few of these still get much play on TV, and more importantly the themes and ideas in them are not the same as today's TV www.classic-tv.com...
See how the top favorites do not match the themes in what we are currently being told are the most popular
1 I love Lucy - no violence, strong male figure
2 M*A*S*H - social commentary strong moral characters
3 Star Trek - social commentary strong moral character
4 The Andy Griffith Show - no violence, strong family unit and moral character
5 Cheers - no violence, and it has beer. “Norm!”
6 The Dick Van Dyke Show - no violence, moral characters
7 The Mary Tyler Moore Show - no violence, strong female independent character not giving in
8 Bewitched - no violence, weak male (does not fit my premise)
9 The Twilight Zone - stories inspiring introspective moral thinking
10 All in the Family - exposes social ills through bigoted character
11 The Carol Burnett Show - no violence, just good clean funny show
12 Happy Days - ayyyyye no violence, strong family unit and moral character
13 Mission: Impossible - violence and pro intel (does not fit my premise)
14 The Cosby Show - no violence, strong moral character, strong male role model
15 The Simpsons - "do'h!" not sure.
16 The Brady Bunch - no violence, moral stories, strong family unit
17 The Avengers - not sure (does not fit my premise)
18 ER - not sure (does not fit my premise)
19 Seinfeld - no violence, thought provoking comedy requiring getting the joke. Dry humor. “Yada, yada, yada”
20 The X-Files - Question authority, I want to believe. “The truth is out there”


Now what we are told people want to watch.
Nielsen top 10 for 2006
www.lostremote.com...
1 AMERICAN IDOL - Judges that are elite tell commoners there worth, sometimes even bitter rebukes from elite judges of average people begging to get in the club
2 AMERICAN IDOL
3 DANCING WITH THE STARS - Watching celebrities even though they can't dance
4 CSI - Violent, Graphic, authority is always right, all people called criminals are always really evil
5 DANCING W/STARS RESULTS
6 NBC SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL - What can I say
7 CSI: MIAMI
8 DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES - break down family unit (I do not watch so correct if I am wrong)
9 HOUSE - main character devoid of trust and bedside manner according to show web page, (I havn't seen it)
10 DEAL OR NO DEAL - Join the club and be part of the rich, a man, high up, unseen will offer deals to you.
10 WITHOUT A TRACE CBS - Authority good, People disappearing

www.hollywoodreporter.com...
"Top DVD TV Series sales, this also shows that what people want to see.
The biggest TV-DVD seller of the year was Paramount's "Chappelle's Show: Season 2 Uncensored," with unit sales estimated at 2.84 million by Home Media Retailing."
The others making up the top 5
Lost: The Complete First Season People banding together in crisis, overcomming personal limitations to survive
Seinfeld: Season 4 - Smart comedy
The Simpsons: The Complete Sixth Season
Friends: The Complete Ninth Season

“Just one more thing …” (Columbo TV Series)
The extreamly socially critical show The Chapelle show, passed the Simpsons in DVD sales. There are reports that the Media power players put preasure on him and perpetuated a smear campaign of drugs and crazy behavior. He left to Africa and stopped hosting the show.

I will finish with some bart simpsons quotes

"I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, there's no way you can prove anything! "

"Cool, I broke his brain! "

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Contrary to what you've just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy. If you'd like to learn more about war, there's lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool, gory pictures. "

"Dad, thanks to TV,' I can't remember what happened 8 minutes ago. No, really, it's a serious problem. Ha, ha, ha! What're we laughing about?"


[edit on 5-10-2007 by Redge777]

Don't mean to nit pick but the company in question is Nielsen Media Group, which does the ratings, hence Nielsen Ratings.

Thanks I corrected my miss spelling of Nielsen,

I got my spelling from my original Google search term. so I looked at my own misspelling "Do'h!". I thought it looked wrong.

That explains why my spell checker did not have word, worse yet I added misspelling to the database.

Any comments on control, or the use of targeted themes in movies to change attitudes?

I have to say i found this a quite interesting read. In my younger years, i was quite obsessed with the Nielsen Ratings System -- not sure why :/

Anyway, I remember reading about how they work, ill see if I can dig out an explanation from the site I used to get all my info/ratings from back in the day when they could publish the overnight ratings and before that, even archive them. Now they're not longer allowed to do either, as far as i know, because Nielsen 'owns' the numbers and they are property of Nielsen.

From memory though -- there is a 'sample group', in America it is probably only of a few thousand people, here in Australia its only a few hundred and we have a population of approximately 20m.

So, say the sample size is 10,000 (i seem to remember its only about half that only off the top of my head, but who knows where I could be picking that number from) then that sample size and their viewing habits, recorded via a Nielsen Box, supposedly reflect all 300 million American's viewing habits to within 99.5% accuracy.

Now don't get me wrong, this system CAN work, but it just happens to be very prone to tampering. Should the sample size accurately reflect the various American demographics within it, then it would rather accurately reflect American viewing habits.

However, should a larger % of say, uneducated and unemployed 'poor' people be present in the sample size than in America overall, you will find dumbed down content starts to rate a lot better.

Likewise, should more educated, well off and concerned Americans be more present in the sample size than in America as a whole, content like "American Idol" just might not rate as well as say, a documentary series about the state of the nation.

Of course you only have to ask yourself not only which type of content is cheaper to produce, but which content brings with it the best advertising dollars per viewer.

Educated people that think for themselves are not the target of Television advertisers. These people can be reached via Newspaper Ads, Radio Ads and now internet ads. Advertisers that use television, for example McDonald's, do not make (the majority of) their money from these people. Advertisers will quite simply pay a premium to reach young viewers (which is why The CW is even around and how FOX got its start), and will pay even more for those that are driven Impulses dictated to them by Television Ads.

AC Nielson was broken into in Richmond BC a couple years ago.

Rarely do the RCMP go through the trouble of fingerprinting a typical office theft, but they actually printed the entire ofice top to bottom and found a small print on the inside of one of the desk drawers or something.

I guess it was really important to them to know who was snooping around and stealing their stuff.

I say they are suspect.

Ive always thought something was up with it.


As a previous poster mentioned in Australia the sample is only a couple hundred people. Those hundred people must be the most beige and boring lot in this whole country. I put the blame square on them for keeping Rove and Bert Newton on tv

What i think is odd is that they could get better ratings figures through our cable TV suppliers. Most of it is owned by Rupert Murdoch and I dont understand why he hasnt taken them on.


So you would think with the technology we have you could get exact figures for all households.

Thanks for the fantastic post Redge.

It reminded me of the days when TV was actually worth watching.

Currently I have not watched TV for over 2 years and taking a look around it seems as though I have missed absolutely nothing.

reply to post by Redge777


One family equals 770,000 people...ya think?

Nielsen is a huge scam. They are putting dreck on the TV by making up stupid numerical formulae, just to trick us into thinking that we want to watch what they want us to think we think we want to watch. They are of course a government shadow group, and their purpose is to turn TV from something of an informatative nature to a cheap box for cheap laughs (not to mention the surreptititious subliminal advertising, which is why we are told to buy certain things).

I have always wondered why local cable companies with the newer boxes don't capture their own ratings and base their channels on that ... and report to the home networks if a show/channel is doing bad ... threaten to drop them or base their pay on viewer stats. Why should a cable company pay a higher premium for a channel people don't watch, then, just maybe, they could pass a little bit of the savings down to the customer ... who is paying for more than 25% advertisement time on tv anyway.

I always thought it was stupid to PAY for ADS. what a croc. Save your money and rent a series, if you like it, then buy it. Now you own it forever, no commercials, no cliffhangers, reruns when you want them. For $100/month that some cable bills are, that is anywhere from 1-5+ series a month. 12-60 a year you own forever. Not too bad, since most stuff is junk on tv anyway, hence, why I don't have cable, just watch it some when elsewhere.

Originally posted by KTK
So you would think with the technology we have you could get exact figures for all households.

Yea, it would be easy and more accurate, so the reason it is not done must be 'the powers that be' do not want accurate reflections of what we want to see, but want to put in front of us what they want us to see.

And it is brutally awful for the most part, occasionally a good series slips through, it speaks of good things, but so much to me seems to be conditioning.

Back in 1930's in Germany, a propaganda wing of the government kept stories of police arrest of criminals in the papers for one reason. To condition that authority is all powerful and always right, those that disagree are the criminals shown in the articles they rolled out.

This is what I see in the many Law and Order series produced by Dick Wolf

[edit on 10-10-2007 by Redge777]

Now you mention it I see paedophilia themes in SVU. They almost glorify it.

In the mid 80's, my family was invited to watch several pilots and respond to a questionnaire about the shows. Only show, out of 5 we watched, that made the cut to broadcast TV was the Cosby spinoff "A Different World".

Just in the last 3 weeks, Nielson has contacted us again, by phone. We are no longer allowed to be a test group because both my son's are employed by cable companies. I guess they think my kids would influence what I watch out of 300 channels.

KTK...my thoughts exactly. You would think the DVR boxes would be able to report what is watched and stored. If they can't do this, the box programmers should be fired for being stupid.

I think the horrible themes in the show SVU fit the goals of evil to break down empathy and caring by emotional attack on the average citizen. If enough horror is seen, people learn to turn off caring, and evil can do what it wants because people are conditioned not to think of the suffering of others.

Also it promotes us/them mentality used in stopping critical thought. We all agree with the evil of the criminals shown on the show. That is the power of the shows. They make a clear cut distinction. The noble and good authority, and the evil twisted criminals.

Imagine now a slander campaign against, lets say, a politician. 'If authority says it is true it must be' is the thoughts of the people. Immediately everyone puts them in the evil slime ball camp, they do not question the authority that spread the slander. I see this as how conditioning of people can help authority and get people to simply accept an agenda, without thinking about it.

Who were the good guys on TV 30 years ago, although still violent they were less graphic and definitely had a different good guy motif
Rockford
Beretta
Magnum PI

Even the silly shows
Dukes of Hazard
A team
Lone Ranger

I agree there were authority shows back then, but today I don't find many non establishment heroes, except in fantasy and scifi.
Farscape ( )
Dark Angel
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Heroes
These all require a translation through allegory, a form of critical thinking rarely done. Plus the heroes seem to have special powers not available to common people. but I digress.

Either the Nielsen ratings are fixed, or the majority of American viewers are complete morons!

I have been a member of the Nielsen homescan for three years, I do answer many of their surveys monthly as part of the membership but my is solely on consumer spending.

They seem to be very preoccupied with Wal-mart sales and spending habits of their costumers.

My beef with Nielsen is in the music industry. they compile the Nielsen soundscan that the billboard ratings are based off of. In my line of work it is useful to have the soundscan but not necessary. All the soundscan tells you is how many albums have sold for a group for that week, how many total over the year, and the percentage of change from the week before in sales. It's only useful for fact checking against the labels when they short change your client with royalties etc... One could imagine other uses for it but thats all the soundscan really does. It shows up every wednesday via email usually. but all the info held in it can be obtained from anybody who works at a label via excel files.

wanna know how much nielsen charges for that one weekly email per year? depending on your company between 20 to 60K a year. Rip off alert.

Nielsen is just about making money and their product is sorta shoddy.