News Broadcasting
Murdoch’s India visit confirmed
After Star TV Executive Chairman Gareth Chang’s recent resignation, and NewsCorp Arthur Anderson officials have visited India twice to asses the value of Star TV, NewsCorp Chairman Rupert Murdoch plans a five day India visit starting 10th March. His wife Wendy Deng and son James, NewsCorp’s Vice President of Music and New Media will accompany him.
The trip is expected to kick off with a two days in Bangalore, where he expects to kickstart NewsCorp’s joint venture with Pramod Mittal’s Ispat Group company eVentures. eVentures has already invested in two portals recently. Net Access, a Delhi based e-business service provider, where eVentures has invested about US$ 1.75 million acquiring a 26 equity.
The joint venture has also acquired 100 percent equity in netpligrims.com, a web based placement service provider. Besides eVentures deals, Star TV plans 10 to 20 percent in popular portals. The net plans to extend synergies between broadcasting and the Internet, “to increase our access to content and tap the traffic which comes on various sites on the Internet,” said News television India Ltd.’s CEO Peter Mukerjea in a newspaper interview. The strategy is via the mergers and acquisitions route, and plans are to for multi-point distribution including the Internet and mobile communications.
Besides, Murdoch will visit Bombay “to meet his office people” as a spokesman puts it. Also appointments are being arranged with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, State Minister for Information and Broadcasting Arun Jaitley, Minister for Information technology Pramod Mahajan and Opposition leader Sonia Gandhi.
Murdoch’s visit, the first since June 1996 when he met Deve Gowda gains significance. The importance of India in it’s Asian strategy is apparent. NewsCorp has doubled it’s content related investment in India over the next five years. An additional US$ 20 million this year has for it’s Indian operation. Murdoch will seeks a first hand view impression on the Broadcast bill including DTH and other regulatory issues, besides it’s proposed Internet /mobile investments in India.
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.
