Osama beats royal wedding in viewership war

Death of Osama bin Laden overshadowed recent television events including royal wedding of Price William and Kate Middleton in London with viewership soaring to all-time high after 9/11 attack, Laden's handiwork.

Updated on: May 4, 2011, 24:13:59 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Death of Osama bin Laden overshadowed recent television events including royal wedding of Price William and Kate Middleton in London with viewership soaring to all-time high after 9/11 attack, Laden's handiwork.

Bin Laden was killed by US troops in a midnight attack at a safe house in Pakistan's Abbottabad district on Sunday night, an event that caught the immediate attention of television viewers world over.

In India, about 42.6 million people watched the news related to killing of Osama on TV, meaning higher viewer-ship than royal wedding and IPL-4.

Around 42.1 million people had turned on their idiot boxes to watch the royal wedding last Friday whereas the average IPL viewer-ship has ranged between 25 and 30 million last weekend.

"English, Hindi and international news channels covered this big news (Bin Ladens' killing) all through Monday making it the biggest television event in recent past," said Jiniti Shah, vice-president of television audience rating company, aMAP (Audience Measurement and Analytics).

In this too, Hindi news channels, grabbed more eyeballs than English ones. Market share of Hindi news channels increased by 35 % soon after news of Osama's death was aired as compared to 21 % gain for the English news channels. Among English channels, the international news channels had reasonably higher audience.

Besides there was a variety of things offered to the audience on Monday on the incident, which included news report about Osama's death, to documentaries about his life and his terror profile.

Osama's death turned out to be the biggest television draw in US after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 with over 55 million watching the news on television at 11 pm on Sunday, television rating company Neilson reported.

Around 70 million people had watched 9/11 attacks on television channels in the US.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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