NDTV's $1.5 bn suit bares media
ratings By Raja Murthy
To straighten the crooked you must
first do a harder thing - straighten yourself.
- The Buddha
Near DEHRADUN,
Northern India - This particular breaking news was
the dreaded stuff of nightmares for India's US$5
billion cable television news industry: a leading
satellite channel New Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV)
filing a lawsuit in a New York court claiming it
had been diddled out of US$810 million through
fake viewer ratings.
NDTV accused
executives of the New York-based global market
research giant ACNielsen, the London-based Kantar,
and their joint venture Television Audience
Measurement (TAM, India) of
accepting bribes from
rival channels to fudge ratings data.
The
already contentious viewership ratings largely
influence which channels bag bigger slices of the
multi-billion dollar advertising pie. According to
a Pitch Madison Media report, the Indian
advertising industry earned $4.6 billion in
revenues in 2011, an 8% increase over the previous
year. The Indian cable news pioneer NDTV suing for
a record $1.39 billion damages showed the sleazier
side, and serious growth pangs, of the world's
third-largest television industry.
At
various levels and dimensions, India's print and
television media struggle with cut-throat
competition, as a desperate result of which
credibility often gets admitted to the casualty
ward. India has over 67 news channels - the
largest number in the world. But with largely an
entertainment content of movies, music, sports and
cookery shows, the news becomes a sideshow with
sensationalism than sensible coverage.
Compared to even some Western democracies,
the Indian media largely enjoys rare freedom to
function. The NDTV lawsuit, though, serves a
significant warning that does not seem to have
registered, judging by lack of adequate media
coverage of the issues raised.
Individual
lives and history of nations show how quickly
freedom is lost when freedom is taken for granted.
Self-regulation and clean-up is obviously better
option than a government straining at the leash
for intervention and control of the press.
Self-discipline is more conspicuous by its
absence in the TV media world, despite industry
bodies like the Indian Broadcasting Foundation,
the Indian Society of Advertisers and Advertising
Agencies Association of India. India's television
business continues being an unregulated jungle
functioning without even advertisement rate cards,
with doors wide open for all manner of fraud.
NDTV's allegations of adulterated ratings
joins other cousins in media corruption like
adulterated news in the print media - or "paid
news", where editorial content is made to order
for corporate houses, politicians, and even page
three personalities. For media insiders, the NDTV
lawsuit was only an overdue global exhibition of
dirty fingers of those quick to point at the dirt
in others.
TAM India, accused of fraud, is
the largely monopoly audience-measuring agency for
over 150 million television-owning Indian
households, the third-largest television market
after China and the USA. Such a ratings monopoly
was begging for big trouble. It seems to have been
delivered in faraway New York on July 26, at the
county Supreme Court near Brooklyn Bridge in Lower
Manhattan, where NDTV lawyers got busy.
NDTV filed its lawsuit under the US
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. It blames
Nielsen and Kantar of "operating worldwide through
a deliberately complex web of subsidiaries and
joint ventures, creating, at least in India, a
monopoly and abusing the power of that monopoly".
Based on revelations of a whistleblower
[1], NDTV has appealed to the New York Supreme
Court to have Nielsen, Kantar and TAM India pay
$810 million to compensate for advertising revenue
lost. NDTV wants another $580 million for
negligence of Nielsen and Kantar officials.
The rest of the television industry is
largely silent over the NDTV ratings case. Yet
over 500 cable channels fight for advertising
scraps largely dependent on TAM outputs that have
long been subject of controversy (see Reality
challenge for India's TV ratings, Asia Times
Online, May 13, 2008).
NDTV chairman and
director Prannoy Roy was a pioneer in India's TV
news, as one of India's first anchors. He launched
the television news show business in India, with
his weekly "World This Week" in 1988, telecast by
what was then India's only television channel,
state-owned Doordarshan.
Over three
decades later, India's television news business
might again change for the better if NDTV wins its
case in New York - to the relief of a TV audience
having its senses bombarded with bedlam. Yet even
before the NDTV lawsuit, noisy news and other
channels were being driven with dubious ratings
data not only limited in scope, but not jogging
along with technology.
Television ratings
statistics, for instance, do not include the
Internet, and hand-held Internet-accessing devices
increasingly offering live television programing.
That has created largely unnoticed flaws.
The Indian media, for instance, widely
reported TAM showing that the hugely popular
Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket season this
year suffered a dip in ratings, from 3.8 rating
points in 2011 to 3.1 in 2012. But the $4.3
billion IPL is covered live on Google's YouTube,
where it shows more than 39. 3 million video
views. The just-concluded London Olympics, in
perspective, had 33.7 million video views on
YouTube.
TAM unearths its audience
preferences from the "Peoplemeter" gadget
installed in viewers' homes. Though TAM claims to
have "the largest" television audience sample in
the world - with 36,000 individuals from across
165 cities and towns - the long-unresolved issue
has been that the sample audience is ridiculously
low to accurately measure viewership in a country
as large and diverse as India.
TAM critics
also say the data can be easily manipulated, after
confidential information such as the addresses of
the people-meters is leaked.
The NDTV
lawsuit is another dimension to revelations like
the Radia Tapes, which showed some well-known
media professionals as lackeys and brokers of
corporate groups and political parties. (See Radia
tapes test Indian media credibility, Asia
Times Online, January 28, 2011).
NDTV,
also muddied in the Radia Tapes dirt, has not
invested much time probing other such glaring
abuses of media freedom, like the so-called "paid
news" phenomenon, where crooked media houses
publish cooked up "news" for a price.
Opposition leader Sushma Swaraj had
revealed in parliament that a leading media house
had offered to carry favorable news and
photographs of her during her 2009 election
campaign in Vidisha parliamentary constituency in
Madhya Pradesh. Swaraj said she was offered a
"package of one crore rupees" (about US$200,000 in
2009).
While the news media rightly
pounces on corruption scandals of politicians,
this particular revelation of criminally
adulterated news has been largely ignored - apart
from a few coffee-table talkathons.
It may
be now left to judges in New York to serve a
bitter but beneficial pill in aid of curing
corruption ailments affecting those guarding the
world's largest democracy.
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