Hyderabad: Statement issued by iNews, a Telugu News Channel, revealed the fact that BARC has internally altered the viewership data that was extracted from the meters.
Citing an email that featured in the forensic report, iNews has raised its concern to BARC India and questioned the measurement agency’s intentions behind hiding the same.
Statement issued by iNews stated, “Wehave accessed parts of the BARC forensic audit report, details of which are now placed in Court. We are disturbed to notice emails exchanged within BARC over a period of time, especially about the Telugu News Genre.”
Some of the excerpts of the BARC internal emails indicate that the ratings may have been manipulated over a long period of time. One such email dated 23rd July, 2018 says “same with Inews – let’s reduce a bit more.” This is just one of the many emails we have come across as part of this forensic audit report
These are concerns we at iNews have been raising with the BARC administration for several years now, and have also met the BARC leadership on the same to address urgently. We re-assert the urgent need to take a closer look at the way news ratings are tabulated by BARC.
Why has BARC concealed this information and why wasn’t this matter investigated?
It may be noticed that many regional news channels were unhappy with the viewership data released by BARC during the past and many regional players were unhappy that their issues were not adequately addressed by the rating agency
