This program explores the characteristics that define a desirable audience, the history of audience ratings, and the ways in which audiences are assessed. Because the mass media is supported largely by selling time and space to marketers, it has evolved into the main delivery vehicle for advertising, in which the company offering a product or service is the true consumer and the attention of the viewer is the product that is being bought. With billions of advertising dollars at stake, marketers, social psychologists, and statisticians carry out sophisticated demographic and psychographic studies to narrow audiences into well-defined consumer groups. On the back end, the Nielsen television rating system uses "people meters" on TVs to determine if viewers are in fact watching what advertisers thought they would. This program also debates the manipulative nature of television and includes a portion of Newt Minnow’s "Vast Wasteland" speech. This video is an indispensable resource for understanding the dynamics of media/audience interaction. (30 minutes)