Because We Do Love A Trainwreck

As a population that thrives off visual and auditory stimulation - we love images of people getting kicked in the crotch, vehicles on fire, fights, animal attack, trainwrecks, and drunk women from the south cursing at law enforcement officials - we will watch just about anything if we think something "interesting" is going to happen.

These habits are easily recordable and provide insight into what programs the American public will and won't watch.

Neilson has been doing a great job of this for years.

However, it's their data that has been seriously misread.



Now that the RNC has completed their little party up in Minnesota, conservative bloggers and pundits are touting the rating figures of John McCain's speech as if they are a signifier that he has somehow "won" something.

You see, this is a something that Bill O'Reilly has never understood, and now we see other conservatives taking one fact ( television rating ) and somehow attempting to manipulate that into something completely unrelated and false ( McCain is going to win ).

There are several things that the Neilson ratings don't take into consideration: did the viewer watch the entire program? How much of the program was watched? Did you agree with everything in the program? Would you watch it again?

You see where i'm going.

The Neilson ratings are great at predicting what you'll watch, they aren't made for predicting how you are going to vote.