Bounced by Nielsen: Oh, Cruel Fate

Sorry, Spock. Mea culpa, Buffy.

It was depressing enough when I learned that the TV diaries Nielsen Media Research Inc. sent my household to track what we watched during one week of November sweeps wouldn’t affect the national ratings, only local programming.

Then late Friday, word surfaced that my diaries were being thrown out entirely because of my story in Friday’s Calendar recounting how becoming a Nielsen family had affected our TV viewing habits.

To quote Homer Simpson, “Oh cruel fate, why do you mock me?”

I waited and wondered through the weekend until I could check first thing Monday with Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus about the rumor.

Sure enough, he said, both diaries my fiancee and I had dutifully kept and proudly mailed in would wind up in Nielsen’ circular file.

“It’s not a big deal,” Loftus said with utmost sympathy to one whose dreams of revamping the television landscape were vanishing at warp speed. “It happens.”

What happens, he continued, is that Nielsen disqualifies any diaries kept by anyone who goes public with the fact that they kept one.

Well less than one-tenth of 1% of all TV households in the country get diaries any given week of ratings sweeps periods, so I would have thought it pretty unlikely one would land in the hands of an entertainment writer.

“Actually, it happens a lot,” Loftus said, although he’d never heard of a journalist being chosen as one of the 5,000 households nationwide whose TV sets are fitted with Nielsen People Meters, which do determine the national ratings numbers.

So my heroic efforts to catch the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Star Trek” reruns, every available “South Park” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode and the perfect .000 viewing average I gave every “reality” TV series during diary week was, as Loftus put it, “all for naught.”

I’m not taking Nielsen’s action personally. Loftus even liked my story but stressed that Nielsen’s policy is there “to maintain the purity of the ratings sample.”

There are, he noted, unsavory characters who try to profit from their diaries by soliciting donations from stations or networks in return for listing their programs in a diary. Nielsen requires stations to report any such attempts, and those diaries are summarily shredded.

In the case of any lucky entertainment reporters who land diaries, Nielsen prefers to avoid even the appearance of data manipulation by throwing them out if the diary keeper sheds his or her anonymity.

I had no financial issues in mind--I merely wanted to change the face of prime-time television.

Loftus sounded almost apologetic as he explained that if my story had run this week, instead of last Friday, my diary data would have been collected, registered and “you’d have been good as gold.”

Still, I haven’t totally abandoned hope of exerting my influence on ratings, local or otherwise. The diaries sent to our household came with my fiancee’s name on them, and she doesn’t use my surname.

So to unearth mine among roughly 250,000 November diaries, they’ll have to comb through each one, cross-checking for multiple entries for “South Park,” “Star Trek” and “Buffy.”

Short of that, my diary information will still be counted. If, however, the Nielsen staff demonstrates the ethical drive and dogged persistence required to locate and weed mine out in service of the ratings’ integrity, maybe the TV universe is in pretty good hands after all.