The Times Group has sent a legal notice to the Broadcast Audience Research Council, accusing it of reducing Times Now to the second spot in terms of television ratings by “fraudulently and illegally” manipulating the numbers to favour another channel. The reference was apparently to Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV.
The network cited BARC’s internal forensic report to show that the numbers had been fudged. “BARC had conducted a forensic audit in the month of July 2020 which revealed that the TRPs of various channels were manipulated, rigged, tampered and at times pre-decided by the erstwhile upper echelon of BARC,” the group said in the legal notice, which was viewed by Scroll.in.
It added: “The TRPs of Times Now, a leading English News Genre channel ranked as the number one channel till, May 2017 in its genre, had been, suspiciously, reduced to the second position in a fraudulent/illegal manner with a view to make another newly-launched English News Channel as…