Honey, who shrunk the audience?

"Frankly, it's very difficult to manage the composition of the sample," replies Cook, who falls back on an age-old bugaboo of pollsters: "People answer a question differently [than] when a census taker asks." As for other inconsistencies: "There's a chance we have too few satellite homes, but we've made it up with more cable homes," he says.

The sample isn't just skewed in the selection process, the network rap continues, it's skewed in practice by technical glitches that in January reduced the households counted (the in-tabulation, or in-tab, rate) to about 80 percent—back to 4,000 homes instead of 5,000. And which homes screw up most? "The ones that do the most viewing or the ones that have the most TVs and VCRs," Cook admits. "There's more that can go wrong." He adds that survey rules written 25 years ago, when most homes had one set and a handful of channels, may be "causing some imbalances. We are reviewing the rules." It's calm talk like this from Nielsen that drives the networks crazy.

Nielsen does have field reps who monitor the meters, and Cook says they've pushed in-tab rates up to 90 percent in recent weeks, in part by adding 16 reps to a force of about 150. But more may be needed. In an internal Nielsen memo dated Feb. 25, head of field operations Juan Mendizabel notes that his staff canceled all vacations in January, adding "There are several caveats that come with the improved performance that we have seen. We cannot expect [the field reps] to continue to be effective if they continue to work 60-plus-hour weeks."

Helping to keep pressure on Nielsen is SMART (Systems for Measuring and Reporting Television), a $40 million, four-year experiment funded by ABC, NBC, and CBS that will begin rating programming in 500 Philadelphia-area homes this fall. Billed as a less cumbersome and more reliable technology than Nielsen's, SMART would require about $75 million before a 1999 national rollout could begin. Is it just a scare tactic? "Nielsen's attitude is, The customer has nowhere to go—why should we fix it?" says NBC's Schiavone. "Well, you know what? They may have guessed wrong."

Advertisers are more than curious about SMART: Procter & Gamble, General Motors, AT&T, and 10 major ad agencies signed on to the project earlier this year. And last week word surfaced that Reuters America is weighing bankrolling SMART's launch.

For the time being, though, everyone's playing on the same lumpy field. Just hope any biases lurking in the Nielsens don't torpedo your favorite show. "We still have to live or die off them," sighs Fox programming VP Bob Greenblatt. "It's like justice—sometimes the jury system works and you put away the bad guy. And sometimes you put away the good guy."