The News Broadcasters Federation (NBF), an Indian TV news industry body, has shot off another missive to audience ratings organization BARC India, accusing the latter of nepotism, obfuscating issues and defying directives of the government.

“History is being wiped out in total disregard, defiance, and violation of MIB (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting) order. Why is BARC board seemingly protecting the interest of select legacy brands?” the subject line of Wednesday’s NBF letter said, urging BARC India to call an open house “for the sake of transparency”.

From the time MIB, on January 12, directed Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India to release the audience data for TV news channels “with immediate effect”, NBF has been consistently questioning as to why the data was not being made public, hinting at nepotism and lack of transparency.

“We, at NBF, India’s largest congregation of news TV channels, are deeply concerned and strongly apprehensive of BARC’s announcement on the resumption of ratings for the news genre, which possibly indicates continued favouritism to select few channels that would reflect in skewed audience measurement numbers and fabricated industry representation when the data is planned to be released on March 17, 2022,” NBF secretary-general R. Jai Krishna said in the latest letter sent to the audience measurement company.

Pointing out that BARC India’s move was in “complete defiance and in violation of MIB’s direction” of January 12, 2022, Krishna said the announcement to resume the audience data for news channels from March 17 came “barely a week after detailed discussion with channels of NBDA (News Broadcasters & Digital Association), which are in “conflict of interest on this issue”.

NBDA, formerly known as News Broadcasters Association, is the older TV news channels’ industry body compared to NBF that came into existence in 2019 and got down to serious business from early 2020 after its members had elected Republic Media Network MD & Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami as its first president. Goswami, who continues to lead the body still with the NBF secretariat being helmed by Krishna, was earlier part of the NBA set-up with Republic TV being a member.

“NBF, as the largest new broadcasters industry association protecting the business interest of news channels, has not been consulted despite several requests on the same (resumption of ratings for TV news channels). We are also apprehensive about whether the date of resumption of ratings i.e. 17 March 2022 or the opt-out methodology has any official seal of approval from the MIB,” Krishna said in the letter.

NBF has also accused BARC India on being “silent on the systems that have to be put in place to correct the impact of landing pages” and urged the ratings body to make “historical data” public and release other details for the entire blackout period that started October 2020 when the process was suspended after alleged irregularities and data manipulation.

NBF has urged BARC India to call for an open house with equal representation from both NBF and NBDA members to discuss and resolve still-contentious issues.