News Broadcasting
Star News spot on with exit poll predictions
MUMBAI: While the general Lok Sabha elections exit polls proved disastrous for all news channels, the Maharastra assembly elections have seen a definite improvement on the prediction front for most news channels. Star News however, can take the most credit for being close to spot on with the results.
After being rapped earlier in the year for misreading the voters’ mood during the Lok Sabha polls, most seem to have got their act together. Star News on 13 October predicted at the end of balloting that the ruling Congress-National Congress Party (NCP) alliance would get 142 seats and the Sena-BJP alliance would bag 122 seats in the 288-seat assembly. Competitor channels on the other hand in an attempt to cover their base predicted an upper and lower limit range. Zee News was the only other news channel, apart from Star stuck its neck out and gave a straight number (Congress-NCP 125 versus Sena-BJP’s 115).
The Maharashtra assembly results out on Saturday showed the ruling alliance won 140 seats with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena combine lagging behind with 118 seats and others and independents with 30.
Speaking to indiantelevision.com, Star News’ CEO Uday Shanker gushes, “We took some corrective measures after the last Lok Sabha elections in consent with our research agency AC Neilson. One, is that we enhanced our sample size as well as covered many more constituencies which accounted for more than 1/3rd of the entire constituencies. Secondly, we also took some statistically corrective measures in an attempt to weed out the divergent trends.”
Interestingly, news channels got a lot of flak during the Lok Sabha elections as politicians made a huge hue and cry about exit polls being grossly off track and misguiding the general sentiment of the people. Shankar adds, “This is not only good news for us but also for the entire broadcast news fraternity as it re-establishes the value of psephological predictions from a news channel’s point of view.”
Exit Poll Predictions released on 13 October:
|
News channel
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Congress-NCP
|
BJP-Shiv Sena
|
BSP & others
|
|
Star News
|
142
|
122
|
24
|
|
Headlines Today
|
140 -50
|
100-110
|
30-40
|
|
Zee News
|
125
|
115
|
48
|
|
NDTV
|
125-135
|
120-130
|
30-45
|
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.
