It is ironical that the head of a television channel in the eye of the raging storm over fabricated audience responses should be seen on the website of the Broadcast Audience Research Council endorsing its activities with the words “Working with BARC has been fabulous experience (sic)”. While Mr. Arnab Goswami of Republic TV may feel put out by the manner in which his channel appears to have been targeted, and may believe that the actions are a consequence of the animosity that the government of Maharashtra and the police in Mumbai have towards him, the fact is that Television Rating Points or TRPs were a scandal waiting to erupt, because of the severe inadequacies in the methodology used to measure viewership.

For it must fairly be admitted that the manipulation of viewership data has been an abiding feature of India’s television industry for two principal reasons. First, the stakes are huge ~ an estimated Rs 80,000 crore in advertising revenues ~ and, second, the abandonment of the old advertising edict coined by Canadian communications thinker Marshall McLuhan more than six decades ago that the medium is the message.

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Consequently, the trashiest television channels garner the highest revenues and the ones most interested in manipulating a system to make a fast buck can do so because of the inadequacies inherent in the measurement methodology. The tragedy of this sordid mess is that the organisations involved have stellar track records.

For instance, Hansa Research which reportedly blew the whistle is an affiliate of one of the most respected advertising agencies in the country ~ R K Swamy ~ and the board of BARC is made up of some of the industry’s most eminent people. The problem though lies elsewhere for these institutions are like boys using thumbs to plug a dike.

The newspaper industry in India had set up robust protocols in the 1940s and 1950s to ensure that the greed of advertising agencies was capped at 15 per cent of advertising revenue. Newspaper circulations were audited, and readership studies sought to assess a title’s reach. Along came private television channels, largely unregulated in the early years, and dependant on imprecise measurement methods, to claim a share of advertising.

They did so, first by offering higher commissions to advertising agencies to offset shaky viewership claims, and later by evolving mechanisms to institutionalise dodgy measurement methods. The erosion of advertising ethics was accompanied by an elevation of the role of number-crunching media planners who focused on the outputs of research without pausing to reflect on what might have gone into manipulating a research finding. These planners, and in many cases their bosses in advertising and planning agencies, lacked the intellectual capacity to understand McLuhan’s dictum and thus opened their wallets to producers of the most puerile content.

Before we knew it, this winning formula had infected the newspaper industry as well, although older, and thus more robust, institutional frameworks still battle to hold on to a semblance of credibility. In the end, it is the viewer and the consumer who get taken for a ride. But that is often the case with greed, isn’t it?