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Bennett Coleman & Company Ltd, India's top newspaper publisher and television channel owner, on Monday said it is mulling legal action against BARC over its alleged role in the manipulation of TV ratings. In a statement, BCCL said it is contemplating legal action against Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) over alleged fraud in declaring rival Republic TV as leading in the English News Genre ahead of the group's Times Now news channel. BARC's Forensic Audit of July 2020, as well as the multiple emails and WhatsApp chats of that period, which has been accessed by Mumbai Police, clearly shows that BCCL's Times Now's TRPs were indeed manually reduced by BARC officials. BCCL, a subscriber of viewership data from BARC for its channels, including Times Now operating under Times Network, said the rating agency had "fraudulently declared Republic TV as No 1, even when Times Now was consistently higher" by a large margin. "Due to this unacceptable and unpardonable act of BARC, Times
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries on Thursday denied reports of selling its news media business to Times Group. Bloomberg early on Thursday reported that Ambani "is in talks to sell his news media assets to India's Times Group, as Asia's richest man plans to unload a business that's been losing money". "Reliance Industries firmly denies (the) story. The story is baseless and false," a company spokesperson said. The report had quoted people familiar with the matter to say that Bennett Coleman & Co, the publisher of the Times of India, is looking to hire advisers for due diligence on the news properties of Ambani's Network18 Media & Investments Ltd. Bennett Coleman's spokesperson couldn't be immediately reached for comments. Reliance had in 2014 bought Network18, which owns and operates 56 local channels spanning news and entertainment, for up to Rs 4,000 crore. Network18 owns TV channels (including CNBCTV18, CNN-IBN, CNN Awaz), websites (firstpost.com, ...