Penblunt & Hogwash

National Readership Survey 'surveyed' and found guilty

Penblunt

Why should the media take all the bashing all the time?

Take this one: the good word is out that now the NRSC (National Readership Studies Council) bullies will have to sober down, bashed down by a newspaper backed by a court order.

What the national big boys at TOI and HT could not does, a regional big boy, Rashtradoot have achieved, ensuring a level playing field and transparency with the NRS surveys. That the opposite was true was always known but had to speak as ‘alleged’ fudging of figures of readership.

The NRS has been caught with its hands down, and told the High Court of Delhi that in the future it would set up a Grievances Redressal Mechanism in handling disputes relating to those all important figures for which newspapers pay a fat cheque but have no guarantee that they would get justice.

The NRS had apparently gone out with an agenda to teach Rashtradoot a lesson for filing a case disputing their figures of the paper’s circulation… and what figures!

In one town of Rajasthan, the NRS said of the sales figures of 2003, Rashtradoot had not sold a copy. Not a single one.

It was not likely Rashtradoot would let go so easily, and they did not. They stuck on to the case, and then NRS did what I feel is abject dadagiri: when the next round of NRS survey came up, and after Rashtradoot filed and paid their fees to be included (which is normal procedure), NRS bosses wrote to them saying the Council had unanimously decided to keep the paper out of all future surveys!

Rashtradoot then moved the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission and got an order to include them, but NRSC surreptitiously went to Supreme Court and got the order stayed.

Allow me to put on record that it was the paper’s efforts but nonetheless, it was a special drive undertaken by the present president of Indian News Paper Society, H C Cama that got the paper and the Council to sit together and draw an agreement.

It gave the newspaper industry for the first time ever a Grievance Redressal Mechanism, which would consist of newspaper representatives, and for good measure, Rasthradoot would be included in it as a member.

This Council did the ‘unthinkable’ but the industry in the end got the ‘unthinkable.’

So, if the figures for Rashtradoot could be slashed down to impossible levels, is it not possible that the figures for TOI and HT are being propelled t to the skies? Is there any sanctity left in this survey? For the case in hand has brought out clinically what the NRSC is capable of.

Let’s see now whether the Council actually implements the agreement and abides by the High Court order, but in the meanwhile, it is time someone did something about the other rating mandarins, the TAM and its TRP, which drives the television industry.

The organisation gives TRP, or Television Rating Points that in the absence of any other mechanism is taken as the correct figures for the TV industry as far as viewership on each channel is concerned.

But what is the sample size of the TAM monitoring machine?

Out of a cable home universe of something like 80 million, TAM has a sample base of a little over 6,000. Insiders say they are unhappy with the situation, but cannot do anything about it.

What is happening, though, is interesting. It is CAS that has is challenging the TAM figures.

In Calcutta, for instance, the records show that the channel which claims itself to be supreme, and claim Calcutta will be on flames if they shut down, has bombed. Out of a CAS universe, which is roughly 60,000 homes in Calcutta, 50,000 have opted not to watch that channel!

CAS is becoming the great leveller now in the TV world, whose content and viewership claims are both make-belief. CAS has shown across the three metros that the so-called prime pay channels have all been roundly rejected.

No wonder that the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, the omnibus body for broadcasters, called for a meeting with the MSOs for the first time to see how they would handle an extended CAS situation.

The fact that the pay channels have been dropped by the viewers came to light when a prime English news channel migrated to the Free to Air arena.

Then a Hindi news channel, with a weird mix of superstition, religion, yoga and utter crude stuff posing as news, which had all along been on FTA, increased its rates by 50 per cent, justifying (correctly) that it was getting more eyeballs than many other news channels put together.

Eventually what will happen is that the advertising industry will have to completely reorient its budget allocations, and it is possible that some of the purses that the newspaper industry had lost to the TV chimera, will migrate back to print.