How Many Listeners?

One of radio's newest and freshest programs, Request Performance (TIME, Feb. 11), was sacked last week by Campbell's Soup, effective April 21. Reason: the show's Hooper and Crossley ratings were not high enough.

The New York Times's Radio Editor Jack Gould wrote: "Ratings are perhaps the biggest cross that radio has to bear and now would be a fine time to heave them out."

Veteran Critic Gould knew he was attacking one of radio's most firmly entrenched practices. Sponsors and agencies, broadcasters and performers are much more concerned with the size of the audience than with the quality of the show. Said Gould: "The rating ... has been exaggerated to such an extreme that broadcasting has come to operate on a meretricious set of values. Whether a program has any intrinsic merit of its own is no longer the prime question."

"Were You Listening?" The two major radio pollsters, C. E. Hooper, Inc., and Crossley, Inc., compile their reports solely from random telephone calls. Hooper gathers its evidence by dialing 1,350 homes (per half-hour program) selected indiscriminately from telephone directories. Four questions are asked: "Were you listening to your radio?" "What program?" "Over what station?" "What is advertised?" To make this twice-monthly national poll, Hooper has representatives in 32 major cities.

Crossley, also using the telephone method, keeps an interviewing staff busy in 81 U.S. cities. Neither company pretends to judge a program's merits.

Concluded Gould: "Ratings have come to fulfill the sinister function of being the absolute critical standard for radio programing. It is as though a Rembrandt, a Beethoven symphony, a burlesque comic, a Tin Pan Alley ballad, a Keats sonnet and a pulp-magazine serial all were to be weighed on the same scales. That would seem too much even for radio."

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