News Broadcasting
BBC World to extensively cover Johannesburg ‘green’ summit
LONDON: BBC World has announced that it will dedicate a large portion of its schedule this month and early September to special programming and news reports related to The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
For BBC World News David Loyn, Hilary Anderson and Nik Gowing will be among the team reporting live from Johannesburg from 26 August. For World Business Report, Mike Sergeant and Richard Scott will be turning the spotlight on the business issues.
In addition to BBC World’s daily news coverage during the World Summit, the channel has commissioned a series of news features and programmes. News presenter Nisha Pillai will be co-hosting a two-part debate, Earth Summit: The Debate filmed at the UNESCO heritage site, ‘The Cradle of Humankind’ outside Johannesburg. Together with Bill Moyers of PBS America, Pillai will lead the discussion between a panel of world leaders and campaigners from all sides of the debate.
Regular BBC World programme, Earth Report, is also featuring a series of specials dedicated to the summit. The Children of Rio will look at the lives of some children all over the world ten years on from the last Summit in Brazil and I Wish offers a unique look at what 21 people from a cross section of global society wish the World Summit would achieve.
The popular interview show, HARDtalk with Tim Sebastian, will run a special week of interviews starting on 26 August with Claudia Sheinbaum, the Mexico City Environment Minister. The monthly magazine show, Africa Direct, will offer a local African environmental perspective when it airs 28 August.
The three-part documentary series, State of the Planet presented by David Attenborough attempts to answer some of the big questions about our planet, assessing the gravity of the environmental crisis and asking what lies ahead at this point in human history. Developing World is a magazine series which takes viewers from Armenia to Zanzibar, Nepal to Peru showing what is possible when people work together, while Life is a five-part award-winning series looking at how the newly globalised world economy is affecting ordinary people across the planet.
News bulletins in August and September will include specially commissioned reports from BBC correspondents around the world highlighting the tension between small projects and government-level statements of intent which have been the product of world summits. Tim Hirsch will be looking at Green capitalism in Brazil and some Micro initiatives using solar power in South Africa.
Jonathan Head follows the course of a river to Bangkok looking at various pollution problems and ending in an environmental project which offers a solution. Ian Bruce follows a scheme in Brazil which gathers local people together to decide how government money should be spent in their area. He also looks at a trade union in Colombia which dared to challenge the powers that be and reports the story of a boy from rural India who will be one of the youngest delegates at the World Summit. Mike Donkin reports on one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon which is under threat, despite international agreements to protect them and their environment. Finally, Shirin Wheeler looks at clean power in Iceland as it becomes a global guinea pig by aiming to be the first fully-fledged hydrogen-powered, eco-friendly economy in the world.
World Summit – Johannesburg 2002 Times in GMT
Earth Summit: The Debate
PART 1
31 August 2:10 pm, 9:10 pm
1 September 9:10 am, 5:10 pm
PART 2
7 September 2:10pm, 9:10 pm
8 September 9:10 am, 5:10 pm
State of the Planet, 3 programmes (NOT AVAILABLE IN PAS 2 REGION)
17, 24 August 2:10 pm, 9:10 pm
18,25 August 9:10 am, 5:10 pm
In addition ‘I Wish’ vignettes will air throughout the schedule in August and September. In the lead up to the earth summit in Johannesburg, 21 individuals from a cross-section of global society were given a unique platform to send their messages to the world leaders and decision-makers attending the summit.
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.
