News Broadcasting
Stork to visit Murdoch again
MUMBAI: There’s no slowing down the septuagenarian media baron Rupert Murdoch.
Wendi and Rupert Murdoch – getting ready to change diapers again Even as his company News Corp has been given another shot at DirecTV in the US, there’s news from the home front: the stork is cleaning up to come a-visiting. Murdoch is once again going to become a Dad. At 71. His third wife, 35-year-old Wendi Deng, is believed to be pregnant once again. The second time since he married her in June 1999.
The first child the two had is a girl named Grace, who is a year old.
Proud Papa – 71-year-old Murdoch with Grace, his first child with Wendi The news has been confirmed by a News Corp spokesperson, after a Fortune magazine writer who interviewed him for a cover story that the magazine is carrying in its latest issue said that Murdoch had shared the good tidings with him.
The child, when it is born will be Murdoch’s sixth. The other five are Prudence Macleod, born in 1959, a product of his first marriage to Patricia, followed by Elisabeth Murdoch, 34, Lachlan Murdoch, 31, and James Murdoch, 30, the outcome of his marriage to his second wife Anna Murdoch, who he divorced a couple of years ago.
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.
