PPM Coalition disappointed by court ruling but not deterred in battle with Arbitron

(February 16, 2010) After being handed a setback by the New York State Court, the PPM Coalition still hopes to get Congress to address its issues with Arbitron's rating system. The group says that the methodology employed in the Portable People Meters discriminates against black and Hispanic broadcasters because the samples are not representative of their audiences.

In protest against Aribitron, the Spanish Broadcasting System (a coalition member) stopped encoding signals on nine stations in five markets. to prevent measurement. Arbitron sought a temporary restraining order to force SBS to reinstate the encoding as its contract required while both parties awaited a court hearing on the matter. Judge Shirley Kornreich ruled that the encoding must remain in place until the lawsuit is resolved in court.

SBS's statement on its actions said "We contend that Arbitron has not lived up to their contractual obligation to deliver reliable and accurate ratings. After Arbitron refused our repeated demands to rectify the situation, we concluded that Arbitron repudiated the parties' agreements. If they were not going to provide us with reliable information, we saw no need to encode."

The PPM Coalition issued a statement following the TRO ruling saying it was "disappointed that the New York State Court continued the injunction requiring Spanish Broadcasting System to encode its programming for Arbitron's inaccurate ratings system. However, the Court was concerned only with the contractual relationship between the parties and could not consider the more significant issue of the decimation of diversity on the nation's airwaves."

The Coalition vowed to continue its efforts to have "Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and the state attorneys general to provide relief from this serious problem."


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