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Termyn8or -> RE: Fox News Caught In Massive Nielsen Ratings Fraud (4/3/2010 1:28:35 AM)
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To the OP, nothing else ;
Up until about five years ago I worked as an elite tech at a company that fixed TVs and has alot of "Nielson families" as customers. There are many fallacies about this whole process in the first place, but....
Even when people had antennae hooked up, set top or roof, the Nielson box connected inside the TV and monitored the local oscillator frequency in the tuner and derived the channel watched therefrom. It transmitted the data via regular phone line to "the company". (google for hetrodyne for more info)
Now each box is the same, and at least in the beginning they wanted empirical data, REAL data. The "Nielson" families would comply for certain treats, like dogs of course but let's not get into that. They had the benefit of not paying for their TV repairs and we got to charge the "company" up the ..... err very good rates.
So at one time they wanted real data. Has anyone been to marketing school in the old days ? The bandwagon theory. Everybody else is doing it so it must be right, right ? So now they skew the rates of viewership and no longer wnat empirical data, they only want data that confirms them. No surprise here.
Might I suggest a funny movie. Pay attention to the beginning because it can lend a bit of insight into how this works. The movie is :
The Ratings Game
Has Danny DeVito in it and what they did was to get a list of the Nielson families and give them all a free cruise. During that time they broke into thier houses and turned the TVs on to their ill crafted show called "The Gumbas". They beat the superbowl, which is unheard of. They all got busted but it serves to prove a point.
Even radio statioons used to have "the book". It was totally determined by ratings as well as they could tell, but the book was VERY important. It determined how much a radio station could command for their airtime, from advertisers. This is their main source of income, because when you tuned into 92.7 they did not get a check. And your car radio was surely not hooked up to a box.
This gave certain people a vast amount of power if they know how to use it.
They did.
T
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