Keeping a Better Watch on TV Audience

Re Rick Du Brow’s column on the book “Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture” (“Has TV Lost Touch With Its Audience?,” Nov. 26):

I agree that “TV has almost certainly lost touch with much of the audience,” and I want to add a suggestion. What is needed is a rating system that actually works. By that I mean a rating system that will accurately reveal at least the number of households (and their demographics) that are watching a program at a given moment.

Is it conceivable in light of upcoming “two-way communication” between television sets and cable or satellite companies that it may be possible to discern how many households in what ZIP codes are watching a program without compromising privacy rights? I don’t think anyone would want a listing of what individual viewers watch in private to be generally or even privately available without their consent. But surely this would not apply to households identified only by their ZIP code.

I would welcome such a system. I believe that if programmers have access to accurate information about how many households in what demographic groups are watching which shows, the shows would quickly become far more representative of what people actually want to watch.

I don’t watch television very often myself. There never seems to be much on that I want to see. I’d really like to see that change.

PHILIP W. LYON

Los Angeles