Racism Without Racists, II
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
To hear the concerns being aired over a new television rating system that was scheduled to be rolled out in New York this month, you’d think it was some kind of racist plot. “Severely undercounting minorities…Disenfranchisement of viewers on a massive scale,” complained an advertisement in the New York Post. The new system could “harm minority empowerment,” and “set back the cause of equal representation,” warned Reps. Gregory Meeks, Edolphus Towns, Major Owens, Jose Serrano, and Nydia Velazquez, all Democrats of New York. Senator Clinton and the speaker of the New York City Council, Gifford Miller, got into the act with their own complaints. Rep. Rangel of Harlem also took to the airwaves to complain.
We’re talking about an electronic device that taps into your television and monitors what program you are watching. It’s an inanimate object. It’s hard to see how a box made of nuts and bolts and silicon chips can be racist. The complaint doesn’t seem to be about who gets the devices — Nielsen says it oversamples minorities — but about the measuring machine itself.
What is going on is that the new electronic system actually counts who is watching more accurately than the old one, which relied on written diaries. One of our acquaintances was once part of a Nielsen family, and he recalls that the way the system worked, one was paid for returning the diary, which one was supposed to keep on an hourly basis. The way it actually worked was that, having ignored the diary for a week, the family sat down at the kitchen table, thought of shows they liked and marked them down as having been “watched,” regardless of whether they actually had been. This is market research, not court-sworn testimony, after all.
Nielsen, in an abundance of caution, has now reportedly delayed the rollout of the “local people meters” here in New York. For now, that leaves advertisers here with an old and probably less accurate way of measuring who their commercials are reaching. The new system, yet to be implemented, has also been called into doubt, however groundlessly.
