People
working round the year usually take a break or a vacation sometime or the
other. They hope to forget the heat and the problems back home and at work and
spend time away from all of it. Some come back rejuvenated and raring to get
back to work, some come back to the same problems they left behind. Nothing
changes. Our media friends had a two-week vacation from their regular jobs and
had a great time gorging on the beast called IPL. The IPL match-fixing scam worked as a trigger for a vacation
from all other news items except for a couple of incidents and disasters. The BCCI is holding an emergency meeting
today to deal with the case of N.
Srinivasan who will be likely ousted from his position of president. The
vacation may end but the billion lies of our media will return to other
stories. This is just to record some bizarre coverage of the IPL scam.
At times
like these the behaviour of the poor frontline reporters and cameramen turns
absolutely insane. They behave like orphaned mongrels fighting over crumbs of
food that someone just threw at the garbage dump in the street corner. The
uncouth and uncivilised behaviour of these reporters during the arrest of Vindoo Dara Singh and Gurunath Meiyappan suggests they need
training on civility first than in reporting. The image says it all. This
happens every time the police arrest someone in a sensational case. The
reporters hounded Vindoo right into the van in which he was taken away and
jumped on Gurunath like a pack of dogs fighting for the leftovers. The siege of
Gurunath was so bad that the police could take him from the vehicle to the
Crime Branch office only after a serious struggle.
The players
mostly remained silent throughout the vacation. The Indian team captain MS
Dhoni refused to answer any questions about the IPL scam during his recent
pressers. I believe he was right in remaining silent as he is not obligated to
feed the media with the titbits they seek. And then Sachin Tendulkar spoke out stating he was “shocked and disappointed” at the events and that he was “hurt”. I wonder if any citizen would
say anything different about the IPL scam. But for the media folks the
interpretation was different. The small statements of SachinT was used to add
more fuel to the campaign and Rajdeep
Sardesai was the first get on TV and proclaim SachinT had “taken a stand”. What stand did Sachin
take? This is how Rajdeep fools people. A mere statement about being hurt or
disappointed is a statement any citizen would make but a call for some specific
action would be a “stand”. Sachin called for nothing and now that he’s also an
MP he throws crumbs that the salivating media gobbles as a major statement.
Numero Uno’s vacation!
The more
sensible and balanced statements weren’t coming from the media but from
prominent citizens with a conscience. Shekhar
Kapur rightly states less than 1% of our population follows cricket
religiously yet the media makes you believe Srinivasan’s resignation will solve
some major problems. Sucheta Dalal
makes an even stronger point. How many of these same media celebs would talk
about media houses and owners who are routinely entrenched in misdeeds and
scams as is the BCCI. A day or two would have made some sense but the two-week
long (and still continuing) campaign of the media against Srinivasan and the
IPL scam looks like a conspiracy and a scam by itself. Naturally, where there’s
a scam politicians can’t be far behind. None of the media celebs sought an
investigation into the Radiagate
scandal. Records suggest that Arun Jaitley, who is dabbling heavily in the BCCI
affairs to set things right, was actually approached to protect a culprit in
the Radiagate episode.
Then there
are moments of comedy in every campaign the media undertakes that come as a
relief and provide a good laugh. Nobody… Nobody does it better than the duo of
Editor and Deputy Editor of CNN-IBN.
The Editor is constantly striving for “integrity
and credibility” which seems to elude him at every corner and the Deputy is
constantly striving to surpass her Social Genius score. The “Numero Uno” guy hopes the BCCI and
Srinivasan problems will get sorted out and his vacation can end and he can get
back to his regular problems. The “Numero
Unee” laments they didn’t tell us how many times Mahendra Karma was stabbed
during the Chattisgarh naxal attack and media is crying over IPL. She does have
a point. But the problem is “Numero Unee” and “Numero Uno” are as helpless as
any other media celeb when a campaign is being dictated by political forces. They
too were on vacation.
An article
in The Telegraph clearly
indicates that the whole campaign against Srinivasan and BCCI was driven by the
Congress party and Sharad Pawar. Naturally! There are few
tainted Congress members in Indian Cricket management. Rajiv Shukla represents the real power-mongering journalist who
became an MP and then a BCCI bigshot. There is no reason to believe the
Barkhas, Rajdeeps, Arnabs and Sagarikas are any different from Shukla. They are
all Rajiv Shuklas still haunting the media. For over 15 days the Congress
successfully managed to throw bigger crumbs to the media with the Bharat Nirman
ads and kept them focused on the IPL scam. In the last 15 days I bet you wouldn’t
have seen too many politicians or political spokies on your TV screen. They had a vacation too.
In every
malicious, hate-filled campaign that the media carries out there is always
someone who trumps everyone else with his sheer nonsense. And this time too, it
was Arnab Goswami all the way. The man has truly become the symbol of the
terrible disease that has inflicted our news media. First he spreads the canard
of a billion people being cheated. This is an outright lie that he knowingly
peddles for sensationalism. Only morons who constantly sit in a studio utter
such crap. Shekhar Kapur rightly points out how many people really care about
Cricket. Even if Kapur has just made a guesstimate I can tell you that in most
places in India people still don’t know the IPL or BCCI.
There are many places in this vast country where people don’t watch
anything let alone Cricket and they form a huge majority. And then Arnab
follows it up with “Crusade for Cricket”.
This guy probably believes he’s the Grand Mufti of TV and propriety but
actually represents the worst in TV journalism. Calling it “cheating a billion”
is the way that Arnab and TimesNow regularly cheat a billion people from real
news and facts. It is a practice with Arnab to fool people with fake headlines
and excessive screaming. I truly pity the reporters like Navika, Bhavtosh and
others who work under him. They must feel like idiots having to work under someone
who acts more like a circus joker.
The awful
truth is that some cricketers and bookies may have cheated but they haven’t stolen
your money. They have cheated your faith in the game but not your money. I
believe the UPA which has not only cheated your faith but also cheated you of
your own money is a far more serious issue than IPL betting and fixing. But the
media can be silenced with a fair share of crumbs as we have come to learn. Now
that this IPL campaign of a billion lies is nearing its end the media celebs
will return to their regular job. They will return to “Hunting season” which is another way of protecting the
Congress. And in doing so they will
manufacture another billion lies right up to election season.
