News Broadcasting
India among partly-free countries as far as Freedom on the Net goes
NEW DELHI: India is 35th among sixty countries in the Freedom on the Net 2013 report.
The annual report is carried out by Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization, and measures the level of internet and digital media freedom in 60 countries.
In the new report, each country received a numerical score from 0 (the most free) to 100 (the least free), which serves as the basis for internet freedom status.
India with 47 points is 18th in the list of the countries listed as partly free (31 to 60 points). There are seventeen countries in the most internet-free countries (0 to 30 points), 29 in the partly free countries, and fourteen in the ‘not free’ list (61 to 100 points).
Iceland with six points tops the list of the free countries with the United States at the fourth place with 17 and the United Kingdom with 24 points, while Iran (91 points) is at the bottom with China (86 points) at the third place from the bottom of the countries which are not free of control. Pakistan has 67 points and is the fifth among the not-free countries.
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.
