Ratings rigged up Republic TV, pushed Times Now down: Cops

MUMBAI: In a major development in the TRP manipulation scam, the city’s joint commissioner of police (crime) Milind Bharambe said at a press conference on Friday that ratings were manipulated to push English news channel Times Now from the top slot to the No. 2 position and make Republic TV the No. 1 news channel.
Similarly, another news channel, CNN-News 18 (formerly CNN-IBN) was pushed to the third slot from its second position, officials said.

Times Now was the No. 1 channel, but within a week of Republic TV’s launch in 2017, officials at the Broadcast Audience Research Council connived to push Times Now to No. 2 and CNN-18 to No. 3, Bharambe said. (Times Now is part of the Times Group, to which this paper belongs.) Bharambe said the manipulations came to light in a forensic audit by a third party at the instance of BARC in June this year, but the findings were not shared with the police, which launched an investigation a few months ago and registered an FIR on October
6. BARC India measures the viewership of TV channels, which is crucial for broadcasters to decide on advertising.
“The auditing was done for 44 weeks in detail on English and Telugu news channels and a few entertainment channels, and it (TRP) was found to be manipulated to a great extent. The TRP ratings were pre-decided and to achieve the highest TRP for some particular channels, viewership data was manipulated using three methods,” Bharambe said.