News Broadcasting
Murdoch lands in Mumbai
Rupert Murdoch landed in his private jet at Mumbai’s Sahar International Airport with his entourage a short while back. Special arrangements were made at the airport for him. A Mercedes Benz drove right onto the tarmac next to his aircraft. News Corp No 2 Chase Carey, Star TV India CEO Peter Mukerjea, and metal baron Pramod Mittal accompanied him as they boarded the car to keep him away from the hordes of photographers and journalists who had parked themselves in front of the airport to get a few words out of him.
With the kind of media attention that he has been getting the current Indian celebrities may surely be developing a complex.
The dapper media baron who has been looking younger ever since his marriage to Wendy Deng and his renewed zest for the WWW and convergence has a whistlestop tour of the city planned out for him.
This includes meetings with local politicians, leading business lights, his former partner Subhash Chandra, and also the staff within Star TV’s India operations. Currently, he is in the Star TV office finding his bearings before getting into a hectic round of meetings with the senior executives of Star TV.
The entire Star TV office in Mumbai has been witnessing a bedlam of activity in preparation of his arrival.
Keep logging for further developments relating to Mr Murdoch.
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.
