Worst news channel of India?

Forty (40) days ago, Faking News started with a loudly declared love for television news reporting and has been steadfastly manifesting its love through various reports it publishes, which attempts to match the standards and style of television news reporting of India, albeit the format is that of print news reporting.

Well well well, we are not closing down after just 40 days, but we are closing down the first phase of an ongoing ‘opinion poll’ that we ran since our very first day. The opinion poll was about finding the worst television news channel of India (look at self-opinionated supercilious us!). And yes, we didn’t define what makes a channel ‘worst’, we left that to the taste and discretion of our readers.

Interestingly we had put only Hindi news channels as contenders for the post – an aspect which caused some of our readers to accuse us of being anglophile. We apologize for appearing to be so. Today we’ll take some corrective measures.

Due to mushrooming Hindi news channels, and all of them claiming to be ‘national’ channels, we had pretty tough time (we are faking it) finalizing the initial list of contenders. With all due respect to all kind of existing news channels, we guess we were not too off-the-mark in choosing our initial list.

Following were the Hindi news channels (arranged in alphabetical order) which we put in race to get votes for winning the worst news channel award (we won’t hand out any trophy or cash or anything; it’s just a figurative term):

• Aaj Tak
• IBN7
• India News
• India TV
• Live India
• NDTV India
• News24
• Sahara Samay
• Star News
• Zee News

In the last 40 days, we had 1600 votes being polled. A bit disappointing number we’d say as we had almost 16000 visitors during the same duration. We hope more and more visitors would participate in the next round of this ongoing opinion poll.

Following figures shows the number of votes each news channel fetched out of the 1600 polled:

In terms of vote share, in percentage, the news channels divided the pie amongst themselves in the following fashion:

Hence after 40 days, the channels can be ranked in the following order in terms of decreasing notoriety:

1. India TV
2. Aaj Tak
3. NDTV India
4. Star News
5. IBN7
6. Sahara Samay
7. Zee News
8. India News
9. Live India
10. News24

Well, our team believes that it doesn’t necessarily mean that the channels lagging in the above race are the preferred channels or ‘better’ channels; maybe they even failed to mess up properly (look at self-opinionated supercilious us!)!

Now, we announce the next round of the opinion poll! Clap! Clap!! Clap!!!

This phase will see the top five channels from the first phase of the poll competing for the award i.e. The Worst Hindi News Channel of India.

And to counter the allegation of being anglophile, we’d also run a parallel poll for finding The Worst English News Channel of India.

We have identified following five contenders among English channels (arranged in alphabetical order) for the award:

• CNN IBN
• Headlines Today
• NDTV 24x7
• NewsX
• Times Now

We are keeping business channels, both Hindi and English, out of this race for some strange reason; you can accuse us of being something like trade/commerce/business-phile.

We don’t know how long we would be running this second round of opinion poll, but it would surely go beyond 60 days. So keep voting and ask your friends to vote.

UPDATE: 19th May 2009

We are finally ending our poll to select worst news channel of India in both Hindi and English genre, and following are the results. The number against each News Channel indicates votes polled in their favor and percentages in parentheses indicate the percentage of people favoring that particular channel in that particular genre.

Hindi News Channels:

• India TV – 716 (49%)
• Aaj Tak – 379 (26%)
• NDTV India – 148 (10%)
• Star News – 107 (7%)
• IBN7 – 101 (6%)

English News Channels:

• Headlines Today – 425 (34%)
• NDTV 24x7 – 252 (20%)
• NewsX – 221 (18%)
• CNN IBN – 181 (14%)
• Times Now – 140 (11%)