Nielsen Might Be the Reason Terrible Shows Stay on the Air

Not to beat a dead horse until it’s the deadest, but it’d be great to learn the reason why Dads hasn’t been cancelled, besides nepotism and the continued power of the white male in an industry supposedly dedicated to creativity. The show’s ratings haven’t even been that fantastic, though they were better than some of its freshman counterparts (RIP, We Are Men). As hard as it is to admit, America, people are watching Dads: a whole 3 million people watched last week’s episode. You can, however, take comfort in the fact that that number could be worth absolutely nothing.

Much has been written about the fear the internet has struck in the hearts of network executives; as the ability to watch television not on the actual TV set has expanded, their ability to figure out exactly who is watching what has decreased dramatically. The bottom line is that the internet has made everything less neat. But there may be another culprit to point to in this numbers game: Nielsen, the company that measures who is watching what. Exhaustive research done by the Council for Research Excellence, reported on Poynter, indicates that Nielsen’s not casting a wide enough population net in gathering their television ratings, and the information they are getting has an increasingly high error rate.

Nielsen ratings are collected in one of two ways: diaries, which requires participants to write down what programs they watch and report them to Nielsen every so often and meters, a box attached to the television that collects that data. Diary collecting is problematic because self-reported data is rife with flaws. Meter reading is problematic because we live in a world with Roku, where people watch television on cell phones. A surprising 30% of Nielsen’s data still comes from diary entries, and the large percentage of people that fill them out look how you might think they would: white, middle-aged or older, with higher education levels. They watch basic channels: ABC, FOX, CBS, NBC. They have a landline. They are not actually what America looks like. They’re what the GOP thinks America looks like.