TRP scam
proves the best of technology and systems
can be compromised and sabotaged
Jawhar Sircar
National Herald, 31 January 2021
A personal sense of betrayal overtakes some of us who spent
so much time and energy to assist
the broadcasting industry in setting up what was perceived to be state-of-the-art technology of television viewership
measurement. One should have realised that the finest of systems can always be
sabotages by perfidious humans and
devilish brains of. The Indian Broadcasting Federation (IBF) had expressed its
dream of putting in position its own ratings body for long before it could
succeed in doing so in 2015. It’s Broadcasting Audience Ratings Council (BARC)
was the first public body that took on the monopoly enjoyed by a private rating
agency called TAM Media Research. This was jointly owned by AC Nielsen and
Kantar Media Research/IMRB, both of which are very well known international
media houses. Besides, there was a smaller ratings firm called aMap, but the
dominant player, TAM, faced perennial charges against it. The first was that it
had too little a sampling base that operated through too few digital
measurement meters and also that the addresses of some of these metered
television households were known to a select few television broadcasters. It
was alleged that these big players bribed people in some of those households
where TV rating meters were installed and thereby rigged the meters in their
favour. Even with a lot of assistance and guidelines from the government, It
took BARC five years to actually start functioning, as the industry had to
invest a lot in its hardware and software. But once it established its
presence, almost the entire broadcasting industry and its advertisers moved
towards this more public and transparent entity, BARC.
The
reason for narrating this story is to explain the background in which today’s
totally targeted BARC system came into being and the extremely high hopes with
which it was begotten and nursed. Even more than this, it is to recall that
underhand games were known quite well under earlier rating systems as well,
proving that we remain all very bad students of history. It teaches lessons
that we never care to understand and then we blame poor history for repeating
itself. It is, of course, a little difficult to digest how a public body so
jealousy overseen by competing rivals could be taken for so big a ride. After all, beside the Indian Broadcasters
Federation (IBF), BARC is governed by the apex federations of advertising and
media players of India, the ISA and the AAAI. It is a pity that such hawk-eyed
oversight failed to realise or suspect that its own appointed gatekeeper was
compromising his and the organisation’s integrity. While governmental bodies
remain notorious for their lethargic, bureaucratic style of functioning, and
also because many a public servant is purchasable, while competing private
bodies are said to be more alert and efficient. Like crabs in a bucket that
keep sharp watch over each other, it is more than strange that the suspiciously
high ratings that were awarded by BARC to some were not questioned by die-hard
rivals represented on the body. Unless, of course, there are more skeletons
that are yet to tumble out of the BARC cupboard.
When one
is openly blessed by the most powerful and forbidding prime minister in India’s
history, one assumes, perhaps, that one is entitled to treat all those he targets as criminals ripe for third degree verbal torture.
Especially, if the person or the organisation has opposed or differed with
India’s most infallible leader. In fact, had it not been for this undisguised
arrogance that this channel-head started displaying with his whiplashes, we may
never even have known about the BARC’s rating scandal. In fact, the brutal
manner in which this regime’s darling anchor went about manufacturing a sensational
case accusing all and sundry in the Bollywood film industry after the suicide
of one its stars was not only intolerable, but downright scurrilous. As he
blazed on ruthlessly with his malicious conjured narrative, slashing the world
around as just expendable ‘collateral damage’, he made the mistake of attacking
the reputation of the police as well. Then, nemesis struck him. Isaac Newton
had articulated certain laws of nature and one of them spoke of an equal and
opposite reaction. This appeared in the form of a criminal case filed by Mumbai
Police against him and all those who participated in the alleged manipulation
of the TRP of BARC, by bribing certain metered households. The world’s largest
network of television measurement and one of the most sophisticated had thus
been breached by its own CEO who claims to have been paid middling amounts of
money.
A mass
of communication through WhatsApp messages between the CEO of BARC and the head
of the nation’s hottest and most acerbic channel was unlocked by the police. It
was then leaked quite interestingly into the public domain. What appears quite
clearly from these messages is that not only was
the TRP system compromised, but the topmost secret of the State, so critical to
the nation’s security and safety, may also have been divulged. This is more
dangerous, and indeed, worrisome. As advocate Prashant Bhushan has demanded, it
needs to be probed deeper. This can only be done by the court if it is
interested or if political parties raise the issue in parliament. All other
controversies and enquiries can wait, but the strong signal that someone,
obviously high up, may have leaked the news of India’s top secret strike that
involved the military and the air force just cannot.
Apart from
this glaring reference there are several others that reveal a very rare
proximity of a media person with the prime minister — one who has gone down in
history as the only one who never addressed a press
conference during his tenure. It speaks of how this nearness and dearness
appeared to be of adroit use in getting things done. This is what may have
induced the CEO of BARC to play the game, as he appears to have been overawed
by the close encounters of the deeply political kind. There is a reference to a
Rathore (we had one as the junior information minister) freezing a scandal
about how the indicted television channel siphoned off Doordarshan’s revenues.
It would be only proper to get into it, if not for anything else, to salvage
the young politician’s reputation.
What
appears to be panning out from these messages is more than just how the game of
thrones is played: it reveals the murky
rivalries that play behind the apparently united phalanx of the godi media
supporting the present dispensation. Thanks to the chronically intemperate
nature of our protagonist, we are rewarded with delightful invectives about the
other television greats of the regime’s genuflecting brigade. There is, thus,
no monolith we confront but an intensely divided ‘me only’ band of media and
other forces that surround the great leader. Let us listen to history’s
whispers that no such arrogant autocrat has ever been perpetuate his rule if he
insists on surrounding himself with such a squabbling army of fawning retainers
(PleaseClick Here to Read the Article on National Herald Website)
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