Excerpted from DickMorris.com, “Obama’s War on Talk Radio”, May 25, 2009
The newest data from Arbitron, the company charged with measuring the size of radio audiences, suggests that listenership to hip hop, inner city, and minority radio has been overstated in the past and that the popularity of conservative talk radio has been under-reported.
This conclusion comes from the company’s decision to dispense with the Stone Age way it has been measuring radio audiences – by hand written diaries based on listener memory – with modern machines which automatically record what the person is listening to and for how long.
Arbitron is the company tasked with rating radio listenership. The equivalent of the Neilson television ratings, its measurements of audience share are revered like Scripture by station managers, owners, and advertisers.
Traditionally, Arbitron relied on hand written diaries. Since the diaries were based on memory, they were often faulty. So Arbitron availed itself of new technology in launching its Portable People Meter (PPM) – a cell phone sized unit the listener wears on his or her belt which automatically notes what station they are tuning in and when they switch or stop.
The PPM measurements concluded that hip hop, urban rock, and minority-oriented radio stations reached fewer listeners and for shorter periods of time than the diaries had indicated. It found that talk radio had a larger listenership.
What is really at work here is an effort by the FCC to stack the deck to help … minority stations earn higher advertising revenues than those to which their real market share would entitle them.
New York and New Jersey sued Arbitron alleging discrimination in its choice of the sample charged with wearing the PPMs.
Now the FCC is launching its own investigation. The FCC’s acting Chairman — Michael J. Copps — announced an investigation of Arbitron’s radio measuring technology called the Portable People Meter.
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June 2, 2009 at 11:04 am |
The analysis put forth here does not necessarily match the data for individual markets – Seattle’s top talk radio station slipped from #3 to #17, and the highest rated conservative talk station (yes there are 2 in Seattle) , dropped from #10 to #21.
Seattle stations that specialize in milquetoast programming did exceedingly well in the new PPM survey.