In broadcasting studies, the situation has been somewhat different with industry organization taking precedence over textual analysis. notions of internal production constraints, external commercial constraints, and of professionalism form the basis for explaining why cultural products reproduce hegemonic ideology. In other words, it explains why in a broadcasting system lacking direct State censorship or control, themes, ideas, claims, values, visions and notions supportive of the capitalist system are promoted via news and entertainment programming, while others critical of the system are reconstructed and re-interpreted in such a way as to co-opt their critical content. Still others are simply excluded [...]

[...] the ratings industry per se and the more specific form of producing ratings for national television are open and competitive--and just happen to have a single more important firm. This lends the status quo within the ratings industry an aura of naturalness; the industry appears to "simply exist" abstracted from the processes of history and the imperative of capitalist economics.

[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a measure was needed to demonstrate that the right product was being produced that the audience for which advertisers expressed a demand was in fact being delivered by broadcasters. Only after agreeing on a basic method for producing measures of productivity and quality could broadcasters and advertisers move to the real business at hand--the buying and selling of audiences according to a rational price structure.

Inherent in the situation, then, is both continuity and discontinuity in the interests of the advertising and broadcasting industries. While continuity rests in the need for an official description of the audience, discontinuity arises from the connection between that description and pricing. [...] neither industry could trust the other to measure productivity and quality, yet both needed some measure in order to transact sales. In this way, despite unified demand for measures of productivity and quality, the situation presented contradictory interests and thereby the possibility for independence for any ratings producer that could successfully manipulate those differences. [...]

commodities shaped by business exigencies and corporate strategies