News Broadcasting
Ad breaks took a break on the news channels
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s horrific multiple terrorist attacks on America’s institution’s of military and financial might, literally all eyes have been and are on the unfolding story. The US has been hit and the world is shaken to the core. Richard Sambrook, director of BBC News on the US disaster, was probably speaking for the media community at large when he said: “I doubt many of us have ever been confronted with a story of such magnitude.”
On a more banal level, there is a huge opportunity here for the various news channels due to the phenomenal increase in eyeballs that an event like this engenders.
So have the ad sales managers been working overtime to bung in as many ads as possible? Quite the opposite actually. On the day of the attack (Tuesday) all the major news networks beaming in India opted for total and blanket news coverage without any ad breaks.
While CNN went the whole hog (understandable it being an American news channel) and has been operating a single news service feed to all its audiences around the world and is still broadcasting without any ad breaks, the other channels began doing so from yesterday. India comes under CNN’s South Asia service.
Business news channel CNBC India’s CEO Haresh Chawla pointed out that during such times as these the only issue with any news channel was to make sure that as comprehensive coverage as is possible is delivered to audiences. Queried about whether advertisers would want to position their products to cash in on the increased viewership he said the channels would not agree to it in the first place and secondly, even advertisers would be reluctant fearing a negative backlash.
Star India’s executive V-P ad sales, Raj Nayak, ruled out any attempt to cash in as it were on increased traffic. “As a news channel, we will not capitalise on tragedies,” Nayak says. Nayak added that the logs for ad breaks were sent (to Hong Kong) 48 hours in advance, so even if there was pressure to increase ad time it could not be done at such short notice.
Nayak added that all programming on the Star World channel was switched to Fox News once the gravity of what had happened in New York and elsewhere in America became clear.
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.
