Another tack is to criticise the researchers and their methods themselves:

This criticism is then extended to include the management of the networks: "Frank Stanton rose from research to twenty five years as president - number two man - of the vast operations of CBS, Inc. Stanton's career established that research could be translated to executive power"(Gitlin p 43), and to the programmers: "many programmers are former researchers" (Gitlin p 54). This is certainly definite proof that the system is entrenched but it is not sufficient reason to reject it. Further, if this is a call to "abandon the institutional point of view (research)" so that we can "finally take seriously the challenge of developing understanding that does justice to the differentiated subtleties of television audiencehood" (Ang p 155), then this is no more than public service broadcasters have traditionally done, that is, to abandon ratings, it is hardly a necessarily progressive point of view.

With a past trend towards effects studies there were attempts (McQuail, Comstock, et al), inspired by the successes of behaviourism in the United States to apply research to what the audience variously did: while watching television, after watching television; instead of watching television; after watching different kinds of television; and so on. When this produced few usable results, unless you count the regulation of taste and decency by governmental agencies, researchers (Vande Burg and Trujillo, John Condry, et al) began to analyse the set itself, a 'TV as mind' fix that only lasted for a few short years in the late 80's: who was on it; how did they act; when was it on; where was the set; and so on. This really represented the last self-reflexive gasp of researcher projects that sought to uncover something essential about the television and its audience, a tendency noticed by Hartley in his examination of Ellis' and Morley's work (Hartley p107). And again no usable results were obtained and certainly no essential characteristics could be determined.

However, it can be terribly unsatisfying to merely chip away at the corners of the anti-cultural industrial edifice, and only one part of a global industrial-commercial edifice (TV) at that. Perhaps this is why political economists are sought-after theorists in broadcast studies in Australia at the moment. It is a wider economic and political view that can best accommodate the observable (monetary, institutional) successes of macro capitalist theory and practice and still propose a radical macro alternative. In all three of the foregoing analyses (Gitlin, Ang and Hartley) there seemed to be a too-parochial, too-inward-looking analysis of why ratings held such strong sway over innocent station executives, who should after all know (their audiences) better. Attention is paid to the fact that ratings have power without offering alternatives to ratings (there are none) and without merely looking at the issue as one of power over the choice of representation.

That "brutal reality" of numbers, the world (view) that "strives toward prediction and control", that haunts the work of cultural theorists (Gitlin, Ang, Hartley, Nightengale, et al) as they struggle against the control of such numbers, makes a human, self-determined world where, "ethnographic understanding, a form of interpretive knowing that purports to increase our sensitivity to the particular details of the ways which actual people deal with television in their everyday lives" (Ang p165), a difficult concept to promote in these ‘pragmatic’ times. This is the case whether arguing before a government board of inquiry as much is it is in the boardrooms of the media and entertainment conglomerates that control local and global television.

As Hartley notes, "the institutional needs and purposes of the television industry are survival and profitability, to be achieved (hopefully) by audience maximisation and by minimising risks and uncertainty" ( Hartley, p 108). These 'needs' are never really accepted as a valid part of providing broadcast services, good or bad, by most cultural theorists and they tend to overly value the interventions of public service broadcasters who simply do not have these same needs. Public service broadcasters have an economic foundation that is not based on profit. It is therefore logical to assume that they can program 'risky' material with 'uncertain' economic rationality determining its scheduling I am not saying that profit should determine or condition support for alternative programming, but that it does. This may seem obvious but it is not. To mere critics of commercial, or for that matter institutional, television it is easy to say that ratings should not be followed but where are other ways of dealing with representation on the TV screen? Ratings act as a form of commercially efficacious representation of audience(s) in lieu of, better or other forms.