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NBDA says 'rolled data' fuelling war-mongering content, demands unrolled data from BARC

In a letter to BARC CEO Nakul Chopra, Avinash Pandey, President of NBDA, contended that the ratings agency's four-week rolling data methodology has been ineffective

by Team PITCH
December 20, 2022

NBDA says 'rolled data' fuelling war-mongering content, demands unrolled data from BARC

Contending that BARC's four-week rolling data methodology is not working and contributing to confusion among the subscribers, the News Broadcasters and Digital Association (NBDA) demanded "unrolled data" from BARC. In a letter to Nakul Chopra, Chief Executive Officer of BARC, Avinash Pandey, President of NBDA emphasised that "rolled data" has been fuelling war-mongering content.

Pointing towards the shortfalls of the method, Pandey noted that the flaw lies in its inability to measure and evaluate the content on a daily basis. This has incapacitated news channels from picking the right story that works. This has resulted in a "high supply or war mongering stories and promotion of toxic content," wrote Pandey.

Here's the full letter:

As you are aware BARC India on 15.10.2020 had temporarily suspended the reporting of individual channel ratings for all news channels. BARC Board had earlier decided that its Technical Committee (Tech Comm) would review the existing standards of measuring and reporting the data of News and Special Interest genres, to address their statistical variability and thereby improve their robustness.

BARC also observed that it was after an extensive consultation with stakeholder representatives that BARC had arrived at a statistically sound and effective solution -the Augmented Data Reporting Standards for the News and Special Interest genres.

Since the launch of the BARC Ratings, we have in our various discussions brought to the notice of BARC that the 4 week rolling data reporting methodology is not working for the news genre and it has led to severe confusion among the subscribers. One of the biggest shortfalls of the 4 week rolling data reporting methodology is its inherent inability to measure and evaluate content at a daily level. As a result, the news channels are unable and incapacitated to decide on the right stories which work or which are working and as a counterblast the same is resulting in high supply of war mongering stories and promotion of frivolous and toxic content. Further, no genre-level information is being reported in unrolled data making the data unusable and meaningless for broadcasters. Which is why in all our discussions and representations, we have repeatedly suggested to BARC to get back to the old unrolled reporting regime.

NBDA Board at its meeting held on 17.11.2022 discussed the above matter. In view of the fact that the unrolled data is making the data unusable and meaningless for news broadcasters, the Board has decided to once again convey to BARC to get back to the old unrolled reporting regime, as soon as possible.