Abstract
This article provides a critical qualitative assessment of the audience and content ratings. Explaining that prevailing discussions and conceptual frameworks on ratings are circumscribed within the boundaries of freedom, threat, surveillance, effects and moral considerations, it argues that the rating issue is embedded in and related with the structure of economic, cultural and political relations, and integral part of the politics of control, domination and struggle. It puts forward critical explanations about dominant meanings of audience and content ratings and their connections with social production and economic relations in society, the control and management of information, commodification and ideological domination, legitimization of ruling structures and relations, shifting the ideological, cultural and material sites of struggle and transferring the social responsibility to viewers, issues of freedom of trade, expression and choice, surveillance and moral and ethical concerns, and methodological validity of ratings.
