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Amid the ongoing battle over TRP ratings, BARC will cease publishing the weekly individual ratings for all news channels for around 8-12 weeks
This decision came after BARC Board proposed that its Technical Committee (Tech Comm) will 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.
As manipulation scandal explodes, TRPs in eye of storm
This exercise would cover all Hindi, Regional, English News and Business News channels with immediate effect.
Therefore, starting with the ‘News Genre’, BARC will cease publishing the weekly individual ratings for all news channels during the exercise. This exercise is expected to take around 8-12 weeks including validation and testing under the supervision of BARC’s Tech Comm.
BARC will continue to release weekly audience estimates for the genre of news by state and language.
TRP racket
Recently, the Mumbai Police unearthed a racket that was aimed at gaming TRP ratings by some news channels.
Explaining the need for this move, Punit Goenka, Chairman of BARC India Board, said, “Given the most recent developments, the BARC Board was of the opinion that a pause was necessitated to enable the industry and BARC to work closely to review its already stringent protocols and further augment them to enable the industry to focus on collaborating for growth and well-natured competitiveness”.
Says Sunil Lulla, CEO, BARC India, “We at BARC take our role in truthfully and faithfully reporting ‘What India Watches’ with the greatest sense of responsibility and work with integrity to ensure that our audience estimates (ratings) remain true to their purpose”.
He added, “besides augmenting current protocols and benchmarking them with global standards, BARC is actively exploring several options to discourage unlawful inducement of its panel home viewers and further strengthening its Code of Conduct to Address Viewership Malpractice”.
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