News Broadcasting
BBC to organise an Olympic debate later this month
MUMBAI: The BBC will organise a debate that will involve the five countries that are bidding to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
One of the participants will be Feliciano Mayoral who is the president and CEO of Madrid 2012. The debate will take place on 27 January in Torino. On that day the European Ice Skating Championships will be held in that Italian city. Mayoral said, “This is a wonderful opportunity to check our rivals’ projects and the mood state of the other bids’ leaders.” The other cities bidding to host the Olympics in 2012 are New York, Paris, Moscow and London.
Although the BBC has not decided when the debate will air, everything indicates that the English network will do it that same night in prime time. The BBC has not clarified as to whether or not participants will have to answer the same questionnaire. The BBC had accepted some conditions imposed by the candidate cities like the utilisation of simultaneous translation.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
