BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi got majority of the prime time coverage in national news channels between March and April, according to a study conducted by CMS Media Lab, a non-profit research organisation. He received 2575 minutes of prime time coverage, 33.21% or one-third of the total time. Despite extensive campaigning Rahul lost out to Kejriwal, coming third in the list. Modi received nearly 7.5 times more coverage than Rahul.
The study was based on analysis of five national television channels - AajTak, ABP News, Zee News, NDTV 24×7 and CNN IBN - during 8-10 pm.
In terms of party-wise coverage, BJP took the top slot, ahead of Congress by 10 percentage points. The study also reveals how news channels gave less coverage to issue-based topics, and focused on personality and party centric coverage. The news coverage was also not reflective of the regional issues and had ignored many states of the country. Most of the regional leaders got less than 1% of total coverage.
The top 3 issues/subjects were leader personality, party affairs and satire/comic. Clearly, the leaders were given more prominence and prime time coverage than their respective parties. Interestingly, issues like public policy, governance, development got only 6.37% of total coverage.
