News Broadcasting
15 months after arrest, apex court grants bail to Bharat Shah
Fifteen months after big-time film financier and diamond trader Bharat Shah was incarcerated due to his alleged connections to the underworld, the Supreme Court garanted him bail yesterday.
Shah was arrested on 8 January 2001 for his alleged links with underworld mafia don Chhota Shakeel under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA).
The Supreme Court directed Shah to furnish a bail bond of Rs 100,000 and two sureties of like amount and directed him to surrender his mobile phone to investigating agencies. Shah’s passport, which was surrendered to the trial court, will not be released without the court’s permission.
The Supreme Court has ordered an expeditious trial in the case.
At that time of his arrest, the Mumbai police exposed his alleged connections with Pakistan-based gangster Chhota Shakeel in the making of the film Chori Chori Chupke Chupke.
Shah’s links to B4U Multimedia, in which he had a 92 per cent stake, forced B4U to transfer all its assets and functions to another group company B4U Television Networks on 1 April 2001.
Shah holds no equity in B4U Television networks. B4U Multimedia was in fact another name for Shah’s own company VIP enterprises and had been promoted to further the B4U’s plans to come out with an IPO.
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.
