Aarushi’s story bigger hit than cricket on TV

People are more interested in knowing who killed Aarushi than watching an IPL match or B'wood big draws SRK and Salman Khan on TV, says a data. Chetan Chauhan reports. See data.

Updated on: Jun 13, 2008, 02:08:49 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Everyone is in the grip of Aarushi frenzy, lapping up every bit of information coming their way in the murder case, suggest television viewership data compiled from homes across India’s heartland.

The data show that people are more interested to know about who killed the Noida schoolgirl, than watch an IPL cricket match or Bollywood big draws Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan on TV.

News channels have reported a jump in their viewership ever since the news of the murder broke, possibly India’s biggest crime story after the Nithari serial killing case of 2006.

On May 23, the day Aarushi’s father Rajesh Talwar was arrested and police claimed it to be an honour killing, the TRP — the viewership-measuring instrument — of Hindi and English news channels was higher than the IPL match between Mohali and Hyderabad.

Five top Hindi news channels had cumulative TRP of over one point as compared to 0.96 for the IPL match, says aMAP, a company that rates television programmes. Television Audience Measurement (TAM), another company in the business of TRP but with a different methodology, gave the news channels close to nine points as compared to 7.5 for the IPL match.

Rights activists said the high TRPs could have been also due to unnecessary sensationalism of the case created by some insensitive reporting.

Some channels went berserk after Meerut IGP Gurdarshan Singh made the sensational claim on TV that Aarushi and Hemraj were killed by Rajesh Talwar because he had found them in an “objectionable but not compromising” position. They even suggested questions that showed Aarushi’s character in poor light. “The television channels conducted media trial of Aarushi, who was not there to defend herself. It would have got them higher TRPs but did a lot of harm to the young soul,” said Bharati Ali of HAQ for Child Rights, an NGO.

For the news channels, it all started on May 16, when the news of the murder broke.

According to TAM, the TRP of Hindi news channels jumped about two points. The jump was confirmed by aMAP too. The head of a Hindi news channel said the Aarushi case was single most important factor for the jump. “To me, the only difference in the news content during the period was the Aarushi murder case. All that news channels ran around the clock was programmes on the twin murder case and that fetched high TRP,” he said.

Sabhyata Arora, a child physiologist at NGO Pratidhi, said the reason why everyone is hooked to the Aarushi story was that it has something for parents as well as children.

“Parents wanted to know about the relationship between a child and parents in an influential family. Children were interested to see what was happening to their peer group,” she said.

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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