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Karl Schembri
It can make or break a television or radio programme and yet it is so flawed. Impressively flawed.
The Broadcasting Authority’s audience survey, covering one week of transmissions every six months, is the determining criterion on which programmes are promoted to prime time or taken off air. Its findings also have direct consequences on sponsorship and advertising rates: the more people watch a programme, the more advertising time becomes expensive, with all the ensuing revenue for the station and/or producers.
Being the only survey of its kind about the broadcasting media, stations and advertisers cannot but await anxiously for the results twice a year, despite all its failings and limitations.
The survey has been turning into more of a farce every year with the major broadcasting players getting wind of when it is to be held. The ‘hottest’ programmes are broadcast during those two weeks, with current affairs programmes ‘investigating’ Satanism and talk-shows discussing sex.
It has been pointed out that generalising from a sample of just above 1,000 interviewees is believed to be potentially misleading.
Now the BA has finally decided to overhaul its survey. It will no longer be held twice a year but everyday, Monday to Sunday, thus eliminating the infamous leaks that were rendering the survey so ridiculous.
The contractor will no longer be Professor Mario Vassallo, but the National Statistics Office. The details of the methodology are still being drawn up, but the BA Chief Executive, Kevin Aquilina, says there will be between five and 10 different people everyday who will be phoned by NSO and asked about the programmes they watched the day before.
Significantly, the new survey will cost the BA Lm10,000 less than the previous one, which according to Dr Aquilina used to cost Lm13,000.
If everything goes according to plan, the interviews will start in June, with the first quarterly report published some time in October or November.
The idea of having an ongoing survey is definitely more helpful in analyzing viewership trends, but the sample of five to 10 viewers per day still carries a high margin of error which demands caution from analysts. Statistically, a sample of 30 people a day would be much more representative, giving more reliability in the cross-tabulation of factors such as gender, age and timeslots.
“Both the new survey and the old one can only serve as indicators of viewership trends,” says Prof. Saviour Chircop, head of the University’s Centre for Communications Technology. “Scientific surveying is much more exact; these two methodologies have high error margins.”
A more reliable system is the Auditel adopted in Italy. A box is affixed to TV sets in households chosen scientifically, which records the station and time spent in front of the TV, giving an instant and accurate result of what people watched at what time.
Only partially accurate actually as this system cannot give a profile of the viewers, nor does a TV switched on automatically imply there is someone watching it.
“Every survey has its trade-off,” Prof. Chircop says.
There is a more sinister affect of the audience survey. Public television ends up competing in the audience ratings frenzy, mimicking the most degraded presentation and programming of commercial television. Any doubters can watch RAI’s reality shows. Programmes which a couple of years ago originated on Mediaset are now occupying prime-time airtime on Italy’s public television stations.
Presenters such as Peppi Azzopardi of Xarabank rubbish this kind of argument, insisting that the public is sovereign in choosing whatever programmes it wants.
While that argument applies to commercial channels, public service television is funded by tax-payers precisely because its mission goes beyond commercial profit and audience ratings. It is primarily to offer good-quality current affairs programmes, as well as to cover the country’s social, political, cultural and historical spheres. They might not be immediate revenue-earners, but they are essential for maintaining a healthy democracy and a dynamic public sphere.
Paradoxically, the downsizing at PBS points to the opposite direction. With some sixty employees left, vision, quality and consistency will be erased once and for all from the glossary of Maltese public service broadcasting, and with them the belief, as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas once put it, that the imperative of ratings ought not to penetrate the very pores of cultural communication.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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