| (The Editor's Pick is a new newsletter from The Hindu that provides a snapshot of the most important stories from today's edition of our newspaper, along with a note from our top editors on why we chose to give prominence to these stories.) India's television rating agency, the Broadcast Audience Research Council, has decided to suspend the rating of all news channels for three months. This decision comes in the wake of the Mumbai police investigation into the manipulation of the Target Rating Point (TRP) system by some channels, including Republic TV. BARC has said that it will review and change how it does ratings during this period. BARC's rating system involves connecting an equipment called Bar-O-Meter to television sets in select households across the country to get data on what channels and programmes people are watching. The Mumbai police's allegation is that three channels paid these survey households to watch them more, thus skewing the data. The data provided by BARC in its weekly reports are used by advertisers to decide where to place advertisements, and hence has huge financial implications. However, in today's Parley in The Hindu, former Doordarshan Director General S.Y. Quraishi and Asianet founder Sashi Kumar point out several flaws in the existing TRP system, such as small and unrepresentative samples. BARC's revamp of the system in the next three months should ideally address these issues. There are ethical implications as well, as Mr. Quraishi and Mr. Sashi Kumar point out. The hunt for higher TRPs has been blamed for aggressive programming by many news channels, at times touting salacious misinformation as news. This larger impact of the alleged criminal act on what millions of people watch as news is what makes this story important | 
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