(Image credit: Getty Images) NEW YORK—The Media Rating Council has issued a statement that Nielsen had understated local viewing earlier this year, with smaller markets exhibiting the most problems. In May, the MRC had criticized Nielsen’s underreporting of national viewing during the pandemic and it is now reporting similar discrepancies in local viewing among the 56 local metered markets it studied. “The results show an overall understatement of reported viewing estimates, which is of a similar dimension to the understatements that were seen in the earlier set of national analyses conducted by Nielsen,” the MRC reported. “The sizes of the differences between the simulated and actual viewing estimates appear to correspond largely to market size, with the smaller metered markets (in particular, those markets with a Set Meter + Return Path Data methodology) evidencing the most pronounced differences, while the larger Local People Meter markets, and, to a lesser extent, the Set Meter + PPM markets, displaying somewhat smaller differences between simulated results and reported viewing.”