Even as tensions between India and Pakistan escalated significantly in the aftermath of the Uri attack and the subsequent surgical strikes, an actual war had broken out between two leading English news channels: Times Now and CNN-News18. Armed with data, statistics, bar graphs, insults and taunts, both channels went to town trying to prove their superior viewership figures.

CNN-News18 has been trumpeting its dominance incessantly, reminding viewers during news segments that they’re watching the “No. 1” channel, also asking uneasy questions of Times Now. In between segments, the channel is running promos declaring a “comprehensive win by CNN-News18 in mega cities” and challenging Times Now to “put out the real numbers”. 

Meanwhile, Times Now responded to CNN-News18 with characteristic swagger.

So who is really winning the ratings war? Behind the chest thumping, though, are weekly viewership figures released by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), an industry body which carries out television audience measurement. The metric used by BARC to discern which channel has better viewership is called impressions, which is defined as the “number of individuals in thousands of a target audience who viewed an “Event”, averaged across minutes. To understand how impressions are calculated, one has to be familiar with another BARC metric – reach. A program’s reach is the number of viewers that watch it for at least one minute. The product of reach and the average time spent equals impressions.

Impressions from weeks 36 to 39 (September 3 to September 30) have Times Now as the most viewed English news channel, with CNN-News18 coming in second, according to BARC data with target audience of males (age 22 and above) across the country.

Incidentally, these four weeks are the same time period chosen by CNN-News18 to highlight their higher viewership.

So is CNN-News18 just dreaming up the numbers? Fortunately for them, no; unfortunately for people looking to make sense of it all, this is where the situation gets a little more complicated. Both channels, despite using the same metric (impressions), are focusing on different sections of the population. Understandably, then, each channel is only touting their viewership in the demographic they lead as proof of their victory over the other. While Times Now is the leader among males over the age of 22 across India (both rural and urban), CNN-News18 contends that it has a higher viewership among all viewers (age 4 and above), but only in six “megacities” (cities with population more than 10 million). Given the different demographics, each channel claiming superiority over the other is almost akin to two athletes competing in different events asserting they are better than each other.

Journalist and media expert Vanita Kohli-Khandekar says this act of “cherry picking data” is a standard marketing tool. “It’s a 20-year-old thing,” she told Newslaundry. “A certain music channel will say that between 8 pm and 8.30 pm, our channel is watched the most by 15 year olds, so everybody does it. There’s nothing new in it,” she said. Considering that English language news attracts such a miniscule proportion of total viewership in the country, such aggressive championing of ratings serves no purpose other than self-glorification, according to Kohli-Khandekar. “English news is such a little drop in the ocean of TV viewership,” she explained. “Now, just for that little drop you have people claiming this much percentage is mine and that much is yours – it’s all rubbish and a pointless discussion. And advertisers know that. This is just to massage the ego of editors and marketers,” she told Newslaundry.

Furthermore, it is difficult to ascertain who is actually winning the ratings war when channels are relying on weekly data to back their claims. Kohli-Khandekar feels that in order to settle the debate, channels should stop relying on weekly or monthly ratings. “If you show me 10 year data or five year data or three year data on what the quarterly channel share was in that particular genre, then you know who the winner is,” she said.

News channels being hostages to weekly ratings is nothing new. Sadly, the vigorous chest thumping we’ve seen recently suggests that the phenomenon is only getting worse and with it, the level of discourse in mainstream news is also deteriorating, particularly in the aftermath of the surgical strikes. Consequently, while it may be unclear who is winning the ratings war, there is one clear loser – the viewer.