News Broadcasting
Trinamool Congress to launch news channel
MUMBAI: Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress is planning to launch a television news channel soon.
Amid media reports, the channel, to be called Maa Mati Manus (Mother, soil and people), will be launched in order to counter “the false propaganda” of West Bengal‘s ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M). The announcement was made by Trinamool Congress party chief Mamata Banerjee on Thursday.
“Unlike the CPI-M, we don‘t have any television news channel to take our views before the public. We will launch our own channel through which we will counter the CPI-M‘s false allegations. The channel will telecast the truth and air the views of the common people,” Banerjee said while addressing a rally at Dum Dum, IANS reported.
Banerjee further added, “Only a few channels sometimes try to broadcast the truth. So we will launch our own channel – Maa Mati Manus – which will telecast the facts.”
Maa Mati Manus (mother, soil and people) is also Trinamool Congress slogan which Banerjee coined at the height of her anti-farmland acquisition agitation in Singur and Nandigram in the state.
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: 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.
