Remember Al Gore? There is a loose parallel between how some Indian TV channels mucked up the Bihar counting day coverage last Sunday with the embarrassing on-air calls that American TV networks made during the 2000 ‘Bush vs Gore’ presidential...
BJP may have lost its big gamble in Bihar, but many TV news channels may also be losers in the viewership stake of credibility. With different channels showing such widely divergent numbers on assembly seats through the morning, viewers were left...
It all started with an Austrian student studying in California. A few years ago, whenMax Schrems found that Facebook was simply ignoring European privacy laws for users, he started a group called Europe versus Facebook and the beginning of...
It has finally happened. A big national channel has finally shifted a major programme totally online. Starting next week, Star Plus’ three-month old fiction show ‘Phir Bhi Na Mane… Badtameez Dil’ will move exclusively to its digital platform...
When your four-year-old boy starts thinking of the burka as cool, it is time to sit up and take notice. Especially, when the burka comes repackaged as ninja-all-black on a Pakistani superheroine, destroying Taliban-like goons while moving to...
Nalin Mehta’s book ‘Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India’ has become a national non-fiction bestseller. The book, which systematically examines the problems with India’s television, and why...
Nalin Mehta’s recently released book ‘Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India’ is receiving rave reviews from around the world. The New York Times devoted an entire column to the book, where the...
It’s first fifteen years, the Indian private broadcasting industry expanded like the American Wild West. Canny local entrepreneurs rode into uncharted territories and planted their stakes in the ground. They then used their incumbent...
Social scientist Nalin Mehta examines the defective paver-blocks of regulations that line the pathways of Indian media, and suggests roadwork. One of the great risks of writing about television is that like cricket, everybody watches it...
The one system that professedly measures the popularity of all TV programmes in India is terribly, terribly flawed. The much maligned and long-suffering head of India’s TV ratings agency TAM, L.V. Krishnan, has a telling story. A couple of years...
Wait. No one watches the news? Then why are there so many news channels. The writer of a new book on the industry explains the real reason these channels are launched. As a genre, news attracts just about 7 percent of viewership in India and...
“India is Modi. Modi is India” screamed the headline in India’s most popular pink paper, The Economic Times, the day after the new Prime Minister’s historic electoral victory, the greatest by the Indian Right and the first clear-cut majority...