'The Mecklenburgers': Is anybody watching?

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- With property taxes rising, Mecklenburg County taxpayers have paid more than $1 million over three years to produce, promote and air a television show that almost no one watches.

It’s called “The Mecklenburgers” – a cross between a sitcom and a public affairs show.

It starts with a peppy, hummable theme song, adds local celebrities, like lovable curmudgeon Robert D. Raiford and former WSOC-TV anchor Suzanne Stephens, and finishes off with professional production.

Its bold three year mission: to make county government entertaining.

County Commission Chair Jennifer Roberts says, “To hold people's attention about issues that really do affect people's lives, you have to put a little entertainment value in it.”

“This is not your grandfather's government television show,” says Danny Diehl, the county’s public information point man who acts as executive producer for the show. “This is innovative. This is informative. This is a one-of-a-kind television show.”

But invoices show this one-of-a-kind TV show is costing the taxpayers more than $421,000 for 10 episodes this year alone, including $23,000 dollars in cost overruns.

Taxpayers are paying:

·a private production company to produce the show

·paying each actor $525 a day

·paying for radio and TV ads to promote the show

·paying a media buyer to place the show and

·paying a commercial TV station -- WAXN-TV -- just to air the show.

“We feel like the citizens of Mecklenburg County are getting a good value for their investment in ‘The Mecklenburgers’,” says Diehl.

And Danny Diehl measures that success by the ratings.

“If you take a look at how many people watched ‘The Mecklenburgers over the last 10 months, it's about 265,000 people according to the Nielsen ratings,” he says.

More than a quarter million viewers?

Really?

That’s about a third of the county!

Have you seen “The Mecklenburgers”?

When we looked closely at the numbers, we found they didn’t add up.

Danny Diehl takes his numbers from colorful charts provided by WAXN and adds them up -- cumulatively -- week after week .

So what's the problem?

Well, problem No. 1 is that no one familiar with television ratings counts viewers this way – by adding them all up.

Because - think about it for a second - if broadcasters totaled viewers cumulatively, we could very quickly claim to have more viewers than there are people watching television in the whole area.

Problem No. 2: “The Mecklenburgers” is aimed at Mecklenburg County.

After all, Mecklenburg taxpayers pay for it.

But the ratings cited by the county are for the whole viewing area -- Union County, Rowan, Gaston, Cabarrus and so forth – even York County, S.C.

So how many of those viewers actually live in Mecklenburg County?

According to the Nielsen ratings, in two of the last three ratings periods the number of Mecklenburg County residents who watched “The Mecklenburgers”:

Zero.

None.

Not a one.

Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory has never been a fan of the show.

“With all respect to my county colleagues, I think the show is a total waste of money and it's an embarrassment and it should be taken off the air,” McCrory said.

McCrory has nothing to do with the show.

He even wrote county commissioners last year asking them not to mention the mayor -- a city function -- in a show paid for by the county.

“I wrote a memo over a year ago strongly disagreeing with the finances of the show because parts of the show were mentioning the Mayor of Charlotte,” he said.

The county likes to point to 18 awards as sign of the quality of the program.

“When you win 18 awards, I think that shows that you're doing something right,” says Chairwoman Roberts.

The mayor’s take?

“I don't care about awards for government; awards for government are useless to the taxpayer,” McCrory said.

And just like the television show, when it comes to the awards, county taxpayers paid for them.