Tribune Co. takes on validity of Nielsen's people meter ratings.

When Nielsen Media Research rolled out a controversial new system for measuring television audiences in Los Angeles last summer, KTLA-TV (Channel 5) General Manager Vincent Malcolm urged a wait-and-see approach.

"The premise has been that the new system would be more accurate, and I'm going to go along with that right now," he said a year ago.

Malcolm's bosses at Tribune Co.'s broadcasting division have waited--and they don't like what they see.

Since Nielsen replaced its diary-based ratings system with an electronic Local People Meter last July, ratings at KTLA and other Tribune television stations have dropped. In May 2005, KTLA posted an overall household rating of 1.7, down from 1.9 from a year earlier. KTLA's household rating in February 2005 was 1.7, down from 2.2 the previous February.

The stakes are particularly high for Tribune, part-owner of the WB, the Burbank-based television network whose programming appeals to disproportionately young and nonwhite audiences and is carried by KTLA.

Nielsen officials caution against attributing the decline in ratings to the new monitoring system. But Tribune, in calling for federal oversight of Nielsen's ratings methodology, is attacking the validity of the measurements in Los Angeles and other markets in which Nielsen has deployed the people meter.

Malcolm and other KTLA officials declined comment, but in July 27 testimony to a U.S. Senate panel considering independent oversight of Nielsen's ratings system, Tribune Broadcasting President Patrick Mullen said that in L.A. and other major markets, the people meters have had unacceptably high error rates among 18-34-year-old men, African Americans and Hispanics, and households with five or more people.

"I regret to say that the measurement system we have today in the largest television markets is not worthy of public trust," Mullen told the Senate Commerce Committee. "It does not have the trust of our company or that of more than a dozen other responsible broadcasters."

Critics say that many of the people meters do not function properly, particularly in nonwhite households where average income is lower and older television sets may not work as well with the meters. Also, the meters cannot account for viewership among large households since the meters do not differentiate a single viewer from a group--and that also may affect Hispanic and African American households disproportionately.

Not everyone believes the new meters are inaccurate. Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director for the media buying firm Horizon Media, said the people meters are capturing the shift from broadcast viewership to cable--hence the resistance from broadcast companies like Tribune and News Corp.

Under the old system, viewers were more likely to remember watching the handful of broadcast stations rather than the hundreds of cable channels available--and their diary entries reflected that, rather than actual viewership, Adgate said.

Nielsen, for its part, acknowledges that the system is still being refined to ensure a representative sample of viewers and to reduce error rates, but insists they are an improvement over the diaries and should not be subjected to government oversight, "Anytime there's a methodology change in a market, you're going to see some fluctuation. Eventually that fluctuation is going to settle out," said spokeswoman Kerry Kielar.