A veteran Canadian media analyst challenges the CBC's interpretation of its ratings from this past year.

From the June 1 Globe and Mail story:

Barry Kiefl, president of Ottawa-based Canadian Media Research Inc. (CMRI), says the 2006-2007 overall season in audience terms was the public TV broadcaster's worst in its 55-year history.

The crux of the dispute focuses on the all-important interpretation of the prime-time ratings, calculated from October through March between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. Kiefl says his analysis of the BBM Nielsen data shows a far less rosy picture than the one CBC is painting. ...

Last week at CBC-TV's upbeat fall launch, Kirstine Layfield, executive director of programming, told the crowd the public broadcaster was basking in its best prime-time ratings in five years, buoyed by the success of shows such as Little Mosque on the Prairie.

The comedy was held up as a godsend, consistently pulling in a weekly audience of more than one million viewers. Other one-million-viewer winners were The Rick Mercer Report, Hockey Night in Canada, The Greatest Canadian Invention, Royal Canadian Air Farce's New Year's Eve special and Test the Nation: Canada's National IQ Test.

Layfield, who has been in the job just over a year, declared “the honeymoon is over, but the love affair is just starting. Viewers are coming back to CBC.”

Kiefl, director of research at CBC from 1983 to 2001, sees it differently. He says the BBM Nielsen numbers show the so-called “love affair” is, in fact, still far from steamy.

According to Kiefl's CMRI, CBC audience share in prime time is a respectable 7.5 per cent from October through March – but still down slightly from the previous year (7.6 per cent, with Olympic viewership removed).

“It's certainly not the highest level in recent years,” adds Kiefl, who says CBC prime-time-audience share was 10 per cent in 2001-2002, according to BBM Nielsen. (In this case, market share is defined as the percentage of the total audience watching television at a given time, aged two years and older.)

His read of BBM Nielsen data shows CBC's overall audience level at its lowest in history, with a 5.3-per-cent audience share in 2006-2007 – down from 5.6 per cent the previous year.

To boot, Kiefl says things are in a sad state when only one CBC-TV series – Little Mosque – actually cracked the one-million-plus weekly viewers. The other programs cited as million-plus winners, he asserts, were only one-off specials, or, in the case of The Rick Mercer Report, hit the benchmark because CBC researchers added together multiple weekly airings (Mercer on Tuesday and Friday).

“I'm not saying they're lying,” says Kiefl. “They're just being overly selective [in their interpretation of the BBM Nielsen data].”