MUMBAI: Every news channel wants to be number one, and it, of course, tries to find some metrics to declare itself as most-watched. This viewership battle has turned into a Twitter banter between two English news channels: India Today and Republic TV.

The banter started with India Today mocking Republic TV for its ‘For The Record’ tag, wherein the latter has been boasting about its viewership gain for being a leader so far this year than its peers in all India males-22-plus-individuals’ category, as per BARC.

India Today shared two promos on its Twitter handle with the caption ‘For The Record’. The first promo, which is a 21-second video, has a gramophone playing audio as similar to Republic TV’s editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami’s voice.

The second promo is even more creative, wherein an image of a cracked gramophone disc, which also called as a record, is shown with Republic TV’s name below it. India Today mocking its rival praised itself with the tagline: ‘A news channel (India Today) that doesn’t sound like a broken record’.

Retaliating to the mockery, Republic TV in its eighth part of ‘For The Record’ edition took a veiled dig at India Today quoting BARC’s data tweeted: “Republic requests SMALLER channels not to fudge numbers when BARC official data is available publicly.”

The record being the keyword here, India Today tried to play with the word and portrayed Republic TV as ‘Broken Record’ in its promo. Post week 14 numbers were out, the former ran a campaign of it being the most-watched news channel with a tag line ‘Where It Matters’, it indirectly touted the latter with its viewership growth in megacities TG males between week 12- 14, as per BARC.