The Arnab Goswami led team of Republic TV had a reason to rejoice today after according to BARC’s ratings from 6 May 2017 – 18 May 2017( for cities with population more than 10 lakh) the total viewership of Republic TV stood at about 51.9%, more than double of Times Now which stood at 24.5%.
https://twitter.com/republic/status/865097887138537473
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsTo look at it via another angle, more people watched Republic TV than all the other News channels combined. This massive dominance of Arnab’s channel less than a fortnight after its launch explains as to why all the old players of the establishment were so nervous about Arnab’s rise.
We had reported how the journalists aligned with the Congress-left establishment had ganged up to attack Arnab in every way possible. The Times Group, Arnab’s former employers also appeared to be going the extra distance by accusing him of ‘theft’ possibly in-order to somehow stop his juggernaut.
The main fundamentals upon which the ratings seem to be based were the high profile exposes by the channel in a very short duration of time.
The Republic team ran exclusive reports on an alleged nexus between Lalu and gangster Shahabuddin, reopened the whole Sunanda Puskhar episode, infiltrated the online network of Lashkar-e-Taiba and also reported ISIS’s presence the Indian soil in just 12 days.
This domination of Republic TV in the English News media space spurred a lot of reactions ranging from the funny, the intelligent to the occasional outrageous one.
Here are a few:
https://twitter.com/WoCharLog/status/865085149360402433
https://twitter.com/Hungrynfool/status/865109171594813441
https://twitter.com/OneTipOneHand_/status/865103521401548801
https://twitter.com/bija_hem/status/865138857112678400
One user decided to pacify Arnab’s detractors by providing ideas to his critics about how they could pontificate that these high ratings might come back to haunt Arnab:
https://twitter.com/rahulroushan/status/865112523552542720
Finally as it turned out at the same time NDTV had managed to notch about 6.9% viewership and people didn’t shy away from commenting:
https://twitter.com/Nesenag/status/865085098395410432