Venkat Ananth was the last speaker to address the students and staff in SIMClairvoyance ’11 on 21st August, 2011. Mr. Ananth is a freelance cricket columnist based in Mumbai. He is an avid cricket lover and currently writes articles on Yahoo! Cricket. Prior to this, he was a Cricket Correspondent at HT Media Ltd. He is also a Journalism Lecturer at the R. D. National College, Mumbai.
Mr Ananth started the session by questioning why the students would like to take up sports journalism, and how people approach sports journalism as an industry. According to him, sports media in India is very emotional, very fickle. He believes that sports journalists should not be biased to their own country while reporting.
There is no coverage about a cricketer’s form and ability as sports person. In the industry there is a mass patriotism that doesn’t allow journalists to criticize sports people. A lot of the time, journalists are caught in a trap of being unable to criticize sportsmen because their newspapers are dependent on revenue they receive from the ads featuring these sports stars.
There is a tendency to deify these people. So when the journalist does the same, it is guaranteed that there is going to be an element of bias. Technical deficiencies are not written about, also because journalists have no understanding of the game, which should be considered a minimum requirement. Mr Ananth raises the point that a lot of us look at sports journalism as fans of the game, but how many people understand the game. Do journalists have the ability to analyze the game, do they have any tactical knowledge of the game?
He brings up the restrictions sports journalisms face for bringing up tough questions, like the lash back and flak from the BCCI. They cannot question the system; see where things are going wrong. Journalists get tangled up in the web of conflict of interest and sometimes the journalists are participants in this conflict of interest. Journalists get into a symbiotic relationship with the sportsman which includes him glorifying the sportsman. According to Mr. Ananth, the relationship should be distant and only as long as the sportsman is doing well. He advises the students from getting too closely involved with the sportsman.
The journalist, agent and player nexus is a reality that controls how discourses are offered. Agents have tie ups with news papers. These are evils in the field that need to be removed. This is the source of the conflict of interest.
Journalists should write about the sport. Their focus and objective should be about capturing the sport and less about the people involved in the game. There is a lack of perspective. As individuals and as journalists we have preferences and biases to individual players, which are inevitable, but Mr Ananth closes his session advising us to remember that a journalist’s job is to cover the facts. That ideally it would be better to not be a fan at all, but if that is not possible, to not let it affect your perspective and reporting of the game.
Mr Ananth started the session by questioning why the students would like to take up sports journalism, and how people approach sports journalism as an industry. According to him, sports media in India is very emotional, very fickle. He believes that sports journalists should not be biased to their own country while reporting.
There is no coverage about a cricketer’s form and ability as sports person. In the industry there is a mass patriotism that doesn’t allow journalists to criticize sports people. A lot of the time, journalists are caught in a trap of being unable to criticize sportsmen because their newspapers are dependent on revenue they receive from the ads featuring these sports stars.
There is a tendency to deify these people. So when the journalist does the same, it is guaranteed that there is going to be an element of bias. Technical deficiencies are not written about, also because journalists have no understanding of the game, which should be considered a minimum requirement. Mr Ananth raises the point that a lot of us look at sports journalism as fans of the game, but how many people understand the game. Do journalists have the ability to analyze the game, do they have any tactical knowledge of the game?
He brings up the restrictions sports journalisms face for bringing up tough questions, like the lash back and flak from the BCCI. They cannot question the system; see where things are going wrong. Journalists get tangled up in the web of conflict of interest and sometimes the journalists are participants in this conflict of interest. Journalists get into a symbiotic relationship with the sportsman which includes him glorifying the sportsman. According to Mr. Ananth, the relationship should be distant and only as long as the sportsman is doing well. He advises the students from getting too closely involved with the sportsman.
The journalist, agent and player nexus is a reality that controls how discourses are offered. Agents have tie ups with news papers. These are evils in the field that need to be removed. This is the source of the conflict of interest.
Journalists should write about the sport. Their focus and objective should be about capturing the sport and less about the people involved in the game. There is a lack of perspective. As individuals and as journalists we have preferences and biases to individual players, which are inevitable, but Mr Ananth closes his session advising us to remember that a journalist’s job is to cover the facts. That ideally it would be better to not be a fan at all, but if that is not possible, to not let it affect your perspective and reporting of the game.
(with inputs from Leah George, MMC 2013)
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