Nielsen's new "people-meter" television-viewing measurators are being deployed to replace the traditional viewing journals and set-top boxen that the media metric firm uses to figure out who watches what. For poorly understood reasons, though, these new measurators generate viewing stats that report 60 percent less viewership for Black and Hispanic-oriented programming than previous measurating technologies. This has prompted Hillary Clinton and others to call on Nielsen to reevaluate its design decisions.
"It is impossible to overstate the potential impact of undercounting minority viewers," Senator Burns said in his own letter to Nielsen. "After years of work to make the entertainment industry more diverse and more reflective of the rich makeup of our country, this system could endanger all the progress that's been made."
