Media lose a golden opportunity with Goody and IPL

Ravi Subramanian, senior vice-president and head, consumer finance, HSBC | Mumbai

Ravi Subramanian

The week that went by was a particularly intriguing one. Two issues dominated the print and the television media and drove up a mass frenzy. The way the media reacted to these two issues confirms my fears that the media is continuing to hurtle at a feverish pace toward what I call "masalafication".

Serious reporting seems to have gone out of the window and has been replaced by inane news readers pretending to indulge in what they think is an intelligent conversation, while the viewers wouldn't need to be too intelligent to realise that it's just not that.

The first one, Jade Goody's "Drama of death" reality show hogged prime-time television slots over the past two weeks. The entire world seems to have been obsessed with the impending death of a terminally ill person. Goody, who was relatively unknown even in her home country, the UK, shot to fame after her infamous racial slur on actor Shilpa Shetty in the popular UK TV show, Big Brother.

That apart, she had no achievement worth mentioning in these columns. However, her death was being covered by live television in India as if it was the death of a super star. Former prime ministers and presidents such as V P Singh, R Venkataraman and so on have not been granted such exposure on their death, nor have business tycoons such as Dhirubhai Ambani. But Jade Goody was different. How? Let's ask the media.

While I am not inhuman and any loss of life is sad and depressing, such a gross commercial exploitation of death of an individual is particularly despicable. Some amount of self-restraint by the media would have been highly appreciated.

The other reality show that played out in complete public domain was the Indian Premier League (IPL) saga. Rather than a sporting event, it became a tool for political one-upmanship. The Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal, Maharashtra and West Bengal governments expressed willingness to hold the tournament despite the general elections, whereas the central government put its foot down.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), unwilling to back down from its stated stand of conducting the tournament on time, went ahead and announced that it was forced to change the dates of the tournament, it would take the tournament outside the country.

On Sunday, true to its word, BCCI kept up its threat and announced that IPL would be held as per schedule either in England or South Africa, most likely the latter. Rather than sit across the table and sort out the issue, the two parties to the conflict played out the game in full public view. The media was only too happy to oblige.

Those who would have seen Ben Affleck's first directorial venture, Gone Baby Gone, would surely remember the opening line in the movie "It's often the things that you do not choose that make you who you are."

So true. For once, I agree with what Narendra Modi said when he challenged the central government. He said that by choosing not to hold the IPL during elections, the government has inadvertently sent out the signal to the world that India is an unsafe place.

It is a matter of shame for the entire country that we cannot manage the security of a sporting event during elections. Not only should this be seen in the background of the IPL, but it should also be viewed in the context of the Commonwealth Games to be held in Delhi next year.

I can surely see multiple nations raising issues on security arrangements during the games next year. The inability of the government to hold the IPL in 2009 will hurt in 2010.

These two incidents last week demonstrated how the media played to the gallery and whipped up hysteria on certain issues without really contributing to the cause. The media, if it had put its mind to it, could have exploited these two incidents to increase public awareness.

But it chose to scandalise and dramatise these two incidents, in the process missing an opportunity that will never come back again.

The Jade Goody episode gave the Indian media an opportunity to raise awareness about cancer in general and cervical cancer in particular. A lost cause now. The IPL issue could have been used to critically analyse the security situation in the country and tell the world that India is not Pakistan.

We are a safe nation. That opportunity has again been frittered away. Whether it was politics of the game of cricket or a game of politics, one can never say.