Who is watching the watchers?

There is a new consortium of media entities who propose to replace the venerable Nielsen ratings with a new, high tech viewership tracking service. There’s no question that Nielsen’s numbers are fraught with problems. College students living away from home between the ages of 18 to 24 remain virtually uncounted. Minorities in urban areas are consistently over-represented, and the sweeps period ratings still rely on the truthfulness of viewers filling out paper diaries. But should we let our cable providers simply track everything we watch and release that data, not only to advertisers, but perhaps to the government? This is the subject of my column today at Pajamas Media, Who Will Watch the Watchers?

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