The Melting Blog

Apparently, Not Everything's So Quiet On the LPM Front

While blogs are being touted as a far more responsive news medium than traditional print media, we're still bound by our geography and timely news sources apparently. Responding to my blog entry from this morning, my anonymous Staffer on the Hill reports straight from the eye of the hurricane:

Quiet?

It wasn't exactly all quiet today before the hearing tomorrow.

The Don't Count Us Out folks were all over the Hill in the last two days. They sent the Latinos to the Latino offices and the blacks to the black offices. The result: a few members will be testifying at the hearing tomorrow and a few others will be submitting statements for the record.

I expect those statements to be full of vague platitudes about the importance of accurate ratings to the community, without more than a shred of evidence for the basis of the concern. Expect the "by as much as 62 percent" figure to be repeated. And if you're lucky enough to get the statement in a Word version, look at the file properties. I'll bet 1000 bucks they were written by News Corp. lobbyists.

The Coalition members say they've had a problem with Nielsen for decades, and are just cruising in the wake that News Corp created to get some attention to their issues. They're right in part in that people are finally paying attention to some of their complaints. The trick is to know when to hop out of that wake lest they drown in the bullshit. The real problem isn't the ratings, it's the failure of the content producers to let a few Latinos on the cast and in the production houses without thinking they have to put up a Chicano version of Steppin Fetchit on TV.

Were poor ratings behind Fox's decision to cancel The Ortegas? That show never aired.

See, I'm sitting here in my office working on proposals and report deadlines (in Los Angeles, three hours behind the pending storm), I forget that the online newswires I depend on to keep up are still a day behind their news cycle! This is fantastic stuff.

Incidentally, Staffer on the Hill also mentions that their office has been getting 15 to 30 calls a day on their overnight voicemail system from "constituents" requesting that their elected representatives put a stop to Nielsen's racist ratings system. Problem is, all the calls are anonymous so there's no sure way of determining if these calls are legit.

If you ask me, I'd say the chances these calls are coming from a hired phone bank center (from India, the Phillipines, or Utah) is pretty high!

Posted by thomas at July 14, 2004 03:22 PM | TrackBack