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Context is everything.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
Editor's note: We’re taking the day off and not publishing one of our daily stories on account of Republic Day. But we do have an important and timely follow-up to our BARC story. Last week was probably the worst in the five-year existence of television ratings agency Broadcast Audience Research Council. A report in The Economic Times finally laid bare an important piece of evidence in the television rating points, or TRP, scam—a forensic audit commissioned by BARC in 2020 and conducted by Acquisory Risk Consultancy, which had been referred to on multiple occasions by the Mumbai Police over the past few months but hadn’t been disclosed yet. A reading of the audit report, a copy of which has been reviewed by The Morning Context, suggests something that BARC has explicitly denied in the past—manual intervention in the ratings data. The forensic audit says viewership ratings were changed on several occasions, and delves into specific instances of wrongdoing—interference with data in the English and Telugu news genres, misuse of company funds, and unexplained incentive plans for select employees. Evidence indicated favouritism shown …
India’s only all-electric ride-hailing company has announced a fresh fundraise to expand fleet capacity; separately, news channels resist a government diktat on ‘national interest’.
A body created to flag violations of the programming and advertising code seems to have turned into the ruling party’s ‘media cell’, keeping tabs on critical coverage.
We delved into five years’ data to look for the worst offenders and find out why India’s leading broadcasting regulator can’t bring them to book.
