Networks hide badly rated shows by misspelling their names in Nielsen submissions

[Garymon]

@fuzzyfungus

it is never safe to bet against the awfulness of a nontrivial data processing system; whether it’s a legacy nightmare with a downright Lovecraftian lifecyle; or a painfully half-baked and rushed replacement for one; yes it can be that bad.

I work on data-centric system. It is fed by a large number of city and state governments, vendor companies and other commercial companies. Lovecraftian describes it well. It is often confusing and frustrating but I have to say that it does a great job of catching bad data and chucking those records to a fallout table where our data folks review and deal with anything the system is unsure about. But yes, I do understand that making changes to such systems can be very painful.

@fuzzyfungus

This inclines one to wonder if, perhaps, the market forces were such that Nielson, for whatever reasons, more closely identifies with the interests of the broadcasters(or requires their cooperation to a degree that cannot be obtained purely by coercion) more than it does with the interests of the advertisers;

This sounds very plausible. The system they are using was probably built when there were three networks and it was easy to see if one was gaming the system too much. Now the number of networks is… out of hand.