News Broadcasting
China mulls banning foreign cartoons from prime time
MUMBAI: Tom and Jerry might bid adieu to China’s prime time television shows soon! As the country’s cartoon industry aspires to get self-sufficient, a ban on foreign-made cartoons is on the cards.
Chinese media reports have quoted state administration officials as saying that, China could ban foreign-made cartoons from its television’s prime time once the quantity and quality of domestic cartoons reach a certain level.
“We really need to encourage domestic-made cartoons. From the mid-80s, a lot of cartoons from America (the United States) and Japan were imported into China for free or at very little cost. It’s a kind of dumping,” China Cartoon Arts Committee head Fu Tiezhen has been quoted in media reports as saying. According to a government official, presently the ratio of foreign-made cartoons to domestic ones is restricted at 4:6.
Foreign cartoons are widely available in china both on TV and on disk. This phenomenon has been a cause of worry to the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television officials who have been putting their best efforts to nurture the domestic animation industry in the country.
Chinese studios are yet to come up with a successful brand of their own. part from a handful of traditional tales like Journey to the West and a few new ones made with government backing, such as The Big Headed Boy, there are few locally made selections.
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.
