NEW DELHI: The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) on Thursday announced the suspension of weekly ratings of TV news channels for a period of three months amid the controvesy around the alleged manipulation of TRPs by Republic TV and two more channels.
This exercise would cover all Hindi, regional, English and business news channels with immediate effect, said BARC in a statement. The BARC will, however, continue to release weekly audience estimates for the genre of news by state and language.
“In the light of the recent developments, BARC board has proposed that its technical committee review and augment the current standards of measuring and reporting the data of niche genres, to improve their statistical robustness and to significantly hamper the potential attempts of infiltrating the panel homes,” said BARC.
Sunil Lulla, CEO, BARC India, said the Council was exploring options to strengthen its ‘code of conduct’ to address viewership malpractice. The withholding of ratings will lead to non-availability of viewership variables like impressions, daily reach, average time spent, cumulative reach, rating percentage for impacted channels.
While BARC will continue to collect and process data for the impacted channels, its technical committee would advise a protocol for release of individual channel data after this period. Welcoming the BARC decision, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) said this period should be used to restore the credibility of the data collected.
NBA president Rajat Sharma said in order to safeguard the integrity of viewership data, human intervention in its collection and processing must be eliminated. “The current atmosphere of toxicity, abuse and fake news is no longer tenable and NBA as the custodian and guardian of broadcast media believes a bold step of putting ratings of news genre on hold will help in improving the content,” he said.
Go to high court, SC tells Republic TV
The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Republic Media Group to approach the Bombay High Court in the TRP scam case registered by Mumbai Police. A three-judge bench said the high court has been working through-out the pandemic and the media group should approach it as its office is located nearby at Worli. Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for the media house, expressed fear about the ongoing probe saying of late, there is a tendency that police commi-ssioners are giving interviews.