Last week, the Mumbai Police said that a TRP (Target Rating Points) racket involving three news channels had been busted . Since then, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), which monitors the TRPs, has suspended ratings of news channels for three months. The alleged scam has once again highlighted the need for regulation. Television channels are driven by TRPs and it is viewership that drives their business. In a conversation moderated by Anuradha Raman , S.Y. Quraishi (a former Chief Election Commissioner and former Director General of Doordarshan) and Sashi Kumar (the founder and editor in chief of Asiaville, a digital multimedia platform) discuss how TRPs are manipulated and what could be the solution. Edited excerpts:
Mr. Quraishi, you wrote recently that manipulating TRPs is not only a financial scam but also morally and ethically wrong. Could you elaborate on that?
S.Y. Quraishi: Viewership generates advertisement spending of nearly ₹27,000 crore. Now, every channel from Doordarshan (DD) to the private channels are eyeing the pie. This kitty should be distributed honestly. And that is where the dishonesty comes through TRPs. The financial fraud, which has been highlighted by the Mumbai Police Commissioner, is one aspect. Now because of that cheating, the channels’ ratings are getting distorted. That is the other aspect. Channels are spreading a hate narrative which is violative of the fundamental right of the citizen to know the truth through the media. The media has become a source of disinformation. And that is the ethical issue. Both dimensions, legal and ethical, are equally serious. What is now being investigated is the financial fraud, which is good enough. We should get to the bottom of the problem.
Mr. Sashi Kumar, as the founder of Asianet, were you bothered by the menace of TRPs?
Sashi Kumar: Yes, certainly. When you are running a private channel, TRPs are in your face. In the early 1990s, when private channels started, we didn’t have people’s meters. We didn’t have the modern, so-called sophisticated systems of verifying who was watching what. We had the diary method. You gave diaries to people and found out what they were watching during the week. That was inadequate and the sampling size was also very small. It was an unscientific method, but the only method and we used that. Advertisers used that along with their own common sense and what their people on the ground — agents, retailers, sellers of consumer durables — told them about the claims of a particular channel and the kind of viewership it was talking about.
Today I think it’s only a difference of degree, not of kind. We still have the same small sampling size for the huge ecosystem of TV viewership that we were introduced to at the beginning. Now, 44,000 homes is the sampling size of BARC. The sample size of Mumbai, which is in the eye of the storm of this TRP fiasco, is only about 2,000 homes, and Mumbai is the biggest TV viewing metropolis in the country. The sample of 2,000 homes is woefully inadequate and distorted. And as Mr. Quraishi said, the problem with this competition for TRPs is that there’s a race to the bottom and therefore, you find people insulting each other, insulting people, doing anything to attract attention. We have ample evidence of this, particularly in the context of the Sushant Singh Rajput case and how it was covered. I think this whole TRP dispute is a sequel to that. It’s a ratings mindset. This ratings mindset has taken over us.
This is not peculiar to television. If you go to a bookshop these days, there is somebody who has already rated the first top-selling 50 books. There is somebody who’s rated the top-selling music. Who’s doing this? There is no transparency in who is rating this. We are therefore limited to choosing from what has already been rated for us. Our intellectual horizons are shrinking, not expanding. And therefore, there’s something very distorted in this process of the ratings mindset and television is a good example we have of that.
The Hindu Explains | TRP and its loopholes
Would you like to weigh in on what Mr. Quraishi said, which is the right of the people to be informed? That the TRP race is not just a financial fraud, but also is also morally and ethically wrong?
Sashi Kumar: Certainly. The role of TV news is to create an informed citizenry which makes for a better, more mature democracy. The duty to inform should be an equivalent duty. Is that what we are getting on TV news? That is a big question mark. TRPs can be deceptive. For example, DD is the biggest act in town. And as recently as April-May this year, BARC itself admitted that DD has the highest reach, demographically and geographically, but it doesn’t get a proportionate share of the advertising revenue because advertising goes by another calculation, which is your purchasing power. So, the advertiser goes for that segment which has better purchasing power, which is why this small sliver of the English news channels, which incidentally account for less than 1% of total TV viewership, and each of these channels, which will be 0.4% of that 1% TV viewing ecosystem, is fighting for the advertisement pie. So, they need these TRP ratings far more than the entertainment channels. The pie is very small. And so the circus every night on these channels.
Comment | The tyranny of TRPs
The scam, as we are calling it now, is nothing new. AC Nielsen-owned TAM was in the news back in 2003-04 when allegations of viewership being rigged surfaced. TAM was dissolved and BARC took its place. It would seem that nothing has really changed.
S.Y. Quraishi: Yes. People meter is the key to understanding the problem, as the entire system of viewership is based on this. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know how it works. When I was in DD, we realised that despite 50% of the country being dependent only on terrestrial network, which meant that half of India was watching only DD, TAM showed us as a shareholder of only 2% of the audience. As a result, the advertisement revenue was assigned to only 2%, which was a fraud.
I asked TAM to install a meter on my official TV. The people meter is operated by a remote control with buttons assigned to every member of the family. They are expected to switch on the button when they are watching a channel and switch it off when they step out of the viewing room. Who is going to do this day after day? The technician who had come to install a people meter admitted after some hesitation that they paid the household in kind: a dinner set for one family, a TV set for another, with a request to watch a channel. Who are the buyers of these products for whom advertisers advertise the Mercedes cars and BMWs? And where are the people meters installed? In poor people’s homes. They are the ones who can be bought over by a pressure cooker and a TV set. So, despite a socioeconomic classification of households on the lines of ABCD and E, the top three segments from A to C will not install a people meter in their homes for ₹500 and ₹1,000 a month. To my mind the cheating was inbuilt into the system. The same people meter continues, only the owner has changed from TAM to BARC. Two years ago, there was a similar scam unearthed in Gwalior.
Also read | Move Bombay High Court first in TRP scam case, Supreme Court tells Arnab Goswami
Would we achieve anything if we increased the sample size?
Sashi Kumar: Increasing the sample size is a first step. But equally important is to get the demographic right so that it is truly representative. As I understand it, BARC pays something like ₹100 to ₹200 to households (a month) where the people meters are installed. And so these households obviously have a particular economic status. There’s a uniformity about it. They are not representative of the TV viewing public, particularly for an English news channel. It is distorted. It’s not just the sampling size. It’s the methodology, the quality of sampling, the geographic and demographic spread.
How should the industry be regulated and who should regulate it? BARC viewership ratings haven’t really addressed the problem.
S.Y. Quraishi: I had put this question to advertisers in my meeting many years ago. This was in the context of TAM being accused of rigging viewership. Namely, this is your money and all of us are interested in your money. So, what precautions are you taking? They said, we have to go by some statistic, some audience figures. Let me also remind you that before TAM became a monopoly, there used to be INTAM, and every week, they would give diametrically opposite viewership figures. TAM bought over INTAM and said, now instead of two currencies there will be one currency. To my mind this was nothing more than cartelisation. Let there be four or five agencies in the same city. They will come up with different figures. And let us aggregate the figures coming from four or five different agencies. Probably, we will get to the truth.
What is wrong with a single currency? We are talking of one nation, one vote, one GST, etc.
Sashi Kumar: Everybody’s vying for the same small sliver of the pie of advertising spend. So, I think it’s a good idea to have checks and balances, to have, say, competing agencies which are professional, so that the industry can then decide which agencies’ figures it wants to follow. There should be some oversight too. For instance, in 2017 BARC had set up an independent disciplinary committee, headed by the retired judge, Justice Mukul Mudgal. Over the next two years, they got about 18 to 20 cases referred to that committee. So, there should be also an oversight committee with teeth. It’s important because the industry is going through a big shift. Already, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has notified a new tariff order where customers can choose channels they want to watch. The people meters have not adapted to reflect these big shifts that have taken place. And if it’s not up to date, it gets distorted. This case of rigging households really affects the medium, smaller players, and the regional media players. I think it makes for a different kind of cartelisation through a corrupt mode. Therefore, these measures must come in to correct the situation. Otherwise, the losers are not just the advertisers. The losers are also the consumers because consumers have a right to be informed. There’s a larger public interest in this and it’s not just something that the industry can incestuously decide for itself.
Should the government get into the business of regulation?
Sashi Kumar: I wouldn’t say the government should step into any such role to regulate the media. It has to be an autonomous body. It has to be the industry, as it’s in the interest of the industry. It’s in the interest of those who are spending ₹25,000 crore or ₹27,000 crore on advertising to make sure that it is cost effective.
S.Y. Quraishi: There’s no question of government regulation, but at the same time, the government can facilitate the process. Maybe the government can pass a law that any violation will face a legal action, criminal action. The government can play an honest broker, but it has to be industry run, it has to be self-regulation and at the same time an independent regulation. Can’t the industry come up with a good, technically foolproof solution? They only have to sit together and apply their mind.
Sashi Kumar is the founder and editor in chief of Asiaville, a digital multimedia platform. He was also the founder of Asianet television channel; S.Y. Quraishi is a former Chief Election Commissioner and former Director General of Doordarshan.
