News Broadcasting
Former CNN chief named MSNBC head
MUMBAI: Former CNN chief and veteran ABC executive Rick Kaplan was named president of MSNBC, on Tuesday. The announcement seems like latest effort in a bid to revive the struggling No. 3 cable news channel.
Kaplan replaces Erik Sorenson, who has run MSNBC since August 1998 as general manager and who will now join the news division of parent network NBC, says a media report.
Kaplan’s tenure at CNN ended in 2000 with him quitting amid a major management shake-up as CNN’s ratings languished near 13-year low. Kaplan’s appointment puts him in charge of a network that has failed several times to assemble a winning prime-time schedule and has struggled to define itself beside its two larger rivals, Fox News Channel and CNN.
Kaplan ran CNN’s domestic operations from 1997 to 2000, and then taught at Harvard. In 2003 he returned to ABC News, where he had been a longtime producer, in a senior management role planning coverage of the Iraq war and presidential campaign
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.
