Prime Time

The broadcast-rating industry was being rated itself last week. Representative Oren Harris' Special Subcommittee on Investigations summoned industry experts, network executives and station operators to try to determine whether the raters "say what they do and do what they say." Starting with the smaller firms which provide local ratings (there are some 200 firms doing such work in Manhattan alone), the testimony turned up some odd bugs.

> Robert E. West, president of Kansas City's Robert S. Conlan Associates, was called because his firm sold an astonishing 500 reports last year throughout the Midwest. West admitted that his entire highly publicized staff of experienced "verifiers," program editors, tabulators and calculators" consists of one woman. Co-Owner Mrs. Hallie Jones. In her off hours, said West. Mrs. Jones manages the office, handles the bookkeeping, and keeps the company's records (none of which could be produced). All field-survey records, explained West, are destroyed "when a girl has time.'' or within three months of a survey's completion. The way the system works : 75% of the surveys are "sold before they're made." by informing a station that it has placed first.

> Videodex, Inc.. of New York, which determines ratings from diaries filled out by TV-set owners (in return for such gratuities as nail files and hair combs), was unable under investigation to show even one of its claimed thousands of diaries. A postal official at Chicago's Merchandise Mart, where the company had a drop box, could recall no such mail's ever arriving, and officials at the warehouse where current diaries were purported to be stored said that they had considered the account dormant since 1956.

> The president of Pennsylvania's Sindlinger & Co. cast doubt on the fixed-sample system. In this system--used by the giant Nielsen company and by Sindlinger until recently--a carefully selected roster of families is picked, checked, wired for sound, and taped for their TV-watching habits. President Sindlinger testified he was disconcerted because Nielsen discovered one of his tame watchers. Just why this bothered him was not fully clear, but it did induce him to change his ways. Said Sindlinger morosely: "I don't think the industry wants true figures anyway.''

The major services had yet to have their full say. The subsurface theme (and threat) of the hearings: the possibility of FCC regulation of rating services.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.