Report: Networks Engage In Slimy Tactics To Pad Their Ratings

All you silly little people who thinks mainstream network news is dead… wait, you actually might be right.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, networks such as NBC, CBS, and ABC have been caught trying to fool the Nielsen system in order to make their ratings look better than they actually are. Particularly when it comes to those networks’s news programs.

The way they do it is kind of clever – in the case of NBC, they enter the title of “NBC’s Nightly News” as both the official title and as the misspelled “NBC’s Nitely News,” in order to fool the automated ratings into thinking it’s two different shows. So, it looks like more people watched the show than really did –

That explains the appearance of “NBC Nitely News,” which apparently aired on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend this year, when a lot of people were away from their TVs. The retitling of “NBC Nightly News” fooled Nielsen’s automated system, which listed “Nitely” as a separate show.
Hiding the May 26 program from Nielsen dramatically improved the show’s average viewership that week. Instead of falling further behind first-place rival “ABC World News Tonight,” NBC news narrowed the gap.

Gee, too bad they can’t use some of that cleverness in actually reporting accurate news. But then they might come by their rating honestly and we can’t have THAT!

They also claim that it’s a “standard industry practice,” so it’s not just NBC doing this –

this is literally fake news. not the way trump says it is (“news i don’t like”), but networks faking their own nameshttps://t.co/OFZS7Yhn4U pic.twitter.com/97Q9Vtv4HC

— Mдтт Иegяiи 🔮 (@MattNegrin) July 6, 2017

“Literally fake news.” Sure looks like it.

So, networks have so little confidence in a product of honesty and integrity (that is, reporting the news objectively, or at least being honest about the message they want to communicate) that they have to fudge their ratings in order to attract business and ad revenue. Or did the public’s low opinion of their lies and deceit come first and this is just how they’re trying to stay afloat?

Either way, this does nothing to disprove the theory that the news media is just a bunch of liars and fakers.

(h/t Twitchy)