Television

January, 1984

As Long as I've known anything about television ratings, I've been suspicious of them. So has nearly everyone I've ever met. How, we've all wondered, could A. C. Nielsen or its main competitor, Arbitron, find a couple of thousand households whose viewing habits perfectly mirror what the rest of us watch each day? There are, after all, 84,000,000 homes now equipped with television. Which means that each home metered by Nielsen, for example, stands for about 50,000 households.Just who are those ch...