http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/46270177.htmlBy: Examiner Editorial
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05/27/09 5:53 PM EDT
It’s received little attention amid House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accusing the CIA of lying, military provocations by the megalomaniacs running Iran and North Korea, and President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. But the frontline in the war being waged by the Left against the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans shifted to the Federal Communications Commission this week. Michael J. Copps, the FCC’s acting chairman, has opened an investigation of radio ratings firm Arbitron. Why? Because Arbitron dared to change the way it measures the audiences listening to individual radio stations, and then reported the results without consideration of their politically incorrect implications.
Briefly, Arbitron for years measured radio audiences by giving people notebooks in which they recorded the stations they were listening to for specified periods. Arbitron recently concluded that the notebooks weren’t as accurate as would be a new high-tech device that listeners strapped to their belts. The device – dubbed the Portable People Meter (PPM) – automatically detected and recorded the stations being selected. Among other things, Arbitron found that the Talk Radio audience was bigger than previously thought, while the audiences for hip hop, urban rock and other minority-owned stations was smaller. Audience size determines how much individual radio stations can charge for advertising, so Arbitron’s ratings are the Holy Grail of the industry.
One might think that politicians would cheer Arbitron’s effort to make its measurements more accurate. But, no, upset by the politically incorrect implications of the new data, Attorneys General Andrew Cuomo in New York and Anne Milgram in New Jersey sued last fall, alleging discrimination. The bias comes in who Arbitron selects to use the PPM, according to Cuomo and Milgram. Since hip hop and urban rock listeners are more likely to have only cell phones, Arbitron’s system, which relies on respondents with landlines, is inherently discriminatory. This week, Copps officially opened a federal investigation of PPM for the same reason. Arbitron could be forced to pay millions of dollars in “restitution†to minority station owners, and the FCC could ban PPM entirely.
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