Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has decided to suspend its weekly ratings of TV news channels for a period of three months, covering all Hindi, regional, English news and business news channels with immediate effect.
BARC measures TV viewership on behalf of broadcasters, advertisers and advertising agencies.
BARC will not publish the weekly individual ratings for all news channels during this period. However, it will release weekly audience estimates for the news genre by state and language.
The decision has been welcomed by News Broadcasters Association (NBA), which represents the news broadcasters. BARC should use these twelve weeks to completely overhaul its systems and restore the credibility of the information it collects about what India watched, said NBA in a press release.
NBA president Rajat Sharma said, ““Recent events have shown that there is much more at stake than just the measurement of news channels’ popularity. We expect that the period of suspension will be utilised to implement important reforms at BARC. To safeguard the integrity of viewership data, human intervention in its collection and processing must be totally eliminated. Complaints, if any, should be dealt with in an independent and transparent manner.”
“The current atmosphere of toxicity, abuse and fake news is no longer tenable and NBA as the custodian and guardian of Indian broadcast media believes a bold step of putting ratings of news genre on hold will help in improving the content,” he added.
The development comes amid the alleged fake TRP scam, when BARC filed a complaint through Hansa Research Group alleging that certain television channels were rigging TRP numbers. It was alleged that some families at whose houses metres for collecting data of viewership were installed, were being bribed to tune into a particular channel.
Last week, Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh had said that Republic TV and two Marathi channels — Box Cinema and Fakt Marathi — manipulated TRP for better advertisement revenue. Republic TV had rubbished Singh’s claims.
