BARC to pause news channels ratings

In the light of recent developments where arrests have been made in an ongoing 'TRP scam', the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) board has decided to stop publishing weekly individual ratings of all news channels.

 

The BARC Board has proposed that it’s technical committee shall review and augment the current standards of measuring and reporting the data of niche genres, to improve statistical robustness and to significantly take on the potential attempts of infiltrating the panel homes. 

 

This exercise would cover all Hindi, regional, English news and business news channels with immediate effect.   

 

Starting with the ‘news' genre, BARC will stop publishing the weekly individual ratings for all news channels during the exercise which is expected to take around 8-12 weeks including validation and testing under the supervision of BARC's tech comm. However, it will continue to release weekly audience estimates for the genre of news by state and language. 

 

Punit Goenka, chairman, 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."

 

Sunil Lulla, CEO, BARC India, added. “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. 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”.