TRP Scam: Times Group Sends Legal Notice to BARC, Seeks Rs 450 Cr in Damages
The notice, which follows alleged chats between Partho Dasgupta and Arnab Goswami, said BARC should also publish a statement stating that Times Now was the leader in the English news genre between 2017-2019.
Logos of BARC and Republic TV and a TV control room. Photo: Reuters Illustration: The Wire
Media15/Feb/2021
Mumbai: Media giant Times Group on Sunday said it has sent a legal notice to Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), alleging the TV rating agency “deliberately reduced” its English news channel’s viewership at the behest of a rival launched in 2017 and demanded compensation of Rs 450 crore.
PUNE: The state prisons department on Saturday suspended superintendent of Alibaug district jail Ambadas Patil after he was indicted in a departmental inquiry for allowing Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami to use his cell phone on the night of November 5, 2020.
Additional director-general (prisons) Sunil Ramanand told TOI, “An inquiry by Arthur Road central jail superintendent revealed that Patil unlawfully gave his phone to Goswami when he was at the makeshift quarantine centre at Alibaug civic school for communication with an outsider.”
Ramanand said, “The inquiry officer relied on the statement of a jail guard, who had seen Patil handing over his phone to Goswami, for communicating with an outsider for more than two minutes. Patil’s call data records and personal details of the caller show that a call was made from his phone late that night.”
Arnab Goswami (File photo)
MUMBAI: Since its launch in May 2017, Arnab Goswami owned news channel Republic TV had gained ‘illegal’ access to an additional 22 million users of a Prasar Bharati-owned direct-to-home (DTH) service, DD FreeDish, without paying the government for it.
Skirting an auction process which required channels to shell out Rs 8-12 crore yearly as carriage fees for a slot, Goswami’s English news channel was broadcast for over two years in an unencrypted form on a bandwidth accessible to all users of the FreeDish service.
The issue loss to exchequer as well as unfair advantage enjoyed by Republic was brought to the notice of the information & broadcasting ministry (MIB) by competitors, and the complaint was forwarded to Prasar Bharati. However, the practice continued till September 2019, when a private DTH service, Dish TV, with which Republic had a deal for transmission began to encrypt the channel. Republic TV had signed carriage deals with a few pri
Arnab Goswami - Symptom of a deeper malaise Updated Jan 20, 2021 | 16:35 IST
When Arnab was on Times Now, I was often on his panel. He had his biases even then, but was far less dictatorial, and was more porous to some degree of discussion and debate. File picture: Arnab Goswami | Photo Credit: IANS
I have known Arnab Goswami for years now. When he met you outside the TV box, he was conspicuously polite, even humble. On screen, he gradually morphed into a brash bully, who harangued dissenters, pulverized the vulnerable, had time only for his own voice, and completely relinquished all journalistic objectivity.