Spin Me Round Like a Record

MAYBE IT'S the transition from thinkin' story to thinkin' bout boxes and Purolator pickups, but there's a couple things that have set my old head a spinnin'.

Remember we talked about the Junos? Well, turns out they got 912, 000 viewers in Canada. That's down from last year, according to Playback Daily:

The exact ratings for last year's show are debatable, however, because BBM's numbers differed considerably from those of its then-competitor Nielsen, which put the audience for the 2006 Junos at 1.2 million.

The difference works out to a drop in ratings somewhere between 25% and 46%. BBM and Nielsen have since joined forces.

That set friend of the blog JB to write in with this comment:

1.7 million versus 1.2 million? That's a hell of a discrepancy. How is anyone supposed to make any kind of decisions or pronouncements based on ratings when the numbers may or may not be off by 500-thousand viewers? And with BBM and Nielson now being one and the same, the problem of accuracy is just hidden, not solved. Picture the producer who finds out her show is drawing half a million viewers -- would you fault her for protesting that in fact it's getting a million? Would you join her in fearing that, actually, no one is watching at all? Hurts my head.

Mine too. Course, there's something about that whole spin that strikes of weird-spin defeatism. They trumpet the fact that the Simpsons beat the Junos (by about 40 000 viewers, not a lot.) And The Amazing Race, the show that caused the contretemps, pulled a million.

Canadian ratings. They are maddening. But why is the spin all about the negative, rather than the fact that a Canadian awards show is, in this day and age, competitive with the Simpsons and the Amazing Race? The last Geminis -- the Canadian TV awards -- drew under 200 000 viewers, I think. 912 000 may be down, but considering all the crap about the show moving over the last week, and the fact that it was live in the relatively small market of Saskatoon -- I think that's still pretty good.

But I guess that doesn't make for a good negative story. I'm with JB, though. The missing 500 000 viewers is ... troubling.

Now please -- let's not discuss ratings in the comments below too much, so my head doesn't explode. Statistical theory works. This is mainly a question of how they're determining the samp--

--oh. there they go. My eyes just glazed over.

There's other things spinning me round today, but we'll get to that.