Noida: On the live webcast of the Visionary Talk series held by the public policy and governance analysis platform, ‘Governance Now’, Mr. Avinash Pandey, CEO, ABP Network put a spotlight on the problems within the measurement system and other complex facets of the news broadcasting industry.
While speaking to Kailashnath Adhikari, MD Governance Now, Mr. Pandey said that the business of news is to inform, educate and entertain. But if ‘entertainment’ takes precedence over the other two, that can create a problem. “Despite the fact that India’s biggest reform in the last two years has been the education sector reform, no TV channel has debated it or held any discussions on this subject. There has hardly been any news around education reforms,” he said.
“Being in the news business, we have an obligation towards the society. Our purpose is not just to earn ratings. It is to inform and reform the society.” He added.
It has been almost 9 months since the suspension of weekly viewership data for individual news channels. Despite that, viewership and advertising continue to grow on the medium. In fact, According to a report by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) and the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA), TV (94%) was the most common medium for consumption of advertising, followed by digital (82%), print (77%) and radio (29%).
Speaking on this issue, Mr. Pandey said, “No rating is better than a bad rating.”
If the rating system is compromised and does not reflect an accurate picture of what’s occurring on the ground, then no rating is better than the rating in question, he explained, while speaking to Mr. Adhikari.
‘BARC’s measurement system was designed to measure entertainment’
According to Mr. Pandey, whenever you run a program that is mindless sensation, involves shouting on top of your voice, fighting with each other, and doing gimmicks in front of the camera, the ratings start to go up because the BARC system has been inherently designed to measure entertainment, which it does very well. But it is not good enough to measure serious content like news.
Pandey said that the NCCS (new consumer classification system) used to classify households that have electricity supply is flawed and needs to be changed. “When the PM is talking about $5 trillion economy we are talking about measuring audience on the criterion of having a TV set at home or having a bike at home. With such an assessment you are comparing audience that watches the news with base-level entertainment programs.”
Giving credit where it’s due, the ABP leader mentioned, “All news editors have always believed that even when some part of news is done for ratings, most news has delivered ground-breaking content. No other channel in the world can compare with [those in] India - which is so diverse and different, that something or the other is happening every day.”
Watch the video: