08 September, 2000

From very early this morning, I was engaged in one of the more mundane tasks of journalism -- collecting, checking, coding and putting up agency stories. This time, on the Olympics.

It is ennui-inducing, simply because it is mechanical. Reuters is a professional agency, their copy comes in letter perfect, so all that remains is for you to do the mechanics -- cut, paste into HTML template, put in the metatags and para marks and file name and stuff and put it up on the net. The kind of thing a kid can do on autopilot.

The good bit is that you can, while clearing the load, let your mind wander.

Mine did. Over the parade of stories crossing my computer.

There is one on a Nigerian athlete, all of 22, killed by a car while crossing the road in Sydney. Another one, on the Australian army being given sweeping powers to crush aboriginal insurgency. In the last few days, there have been stories about high winds in the Olympic stadium, sub-standard soccer pitches, traffic breakdowns, team buses that wouldn't even arrive to pick up the teams, airport chaos.... and plenty more in the same vein.

The snafus have been reported, extensively, in the Australian and international media.

The reporting has been what good reporting should be: What happened, why it happened, what steps are being taken to ensure that it doesn't happen again, what are the authorities saying about it, end of story.

Now, just for a moment, imagine that the Games are being held in India (or, for that matter, any Asian, African, Latin American country). And that an athlete was killed crossing the road, and a team cooled its heels for three hours before the bus arrived to pick it up, and light fixtures and hoardings and stuff blew down in the main stadium, and baggage got lost, and thieves robbed a star athlete (Michael Johnson, in Sydney), and so on...

What would the reporting be like? It would be, horrors, athlete killed, India (substitute any other country from the geographical segments mentioned above) is like that, crowded, dirty, overcrowded, with unsafe roads, part of the perils of going to an undeveloped country, such a disgrace, they should not be allowed to host such big events, blah blah blah...

No, I am not exaggerating. The last big event we hosted, for instance, was the 1996 World Cup, and remember the hoo-haa at the time, in the international media, when the laser show went slightly awry at the opening ceremony because of the breeze, and the odd transport problem cropped up?

In Sydney, all hotels have doubled their prices (which are pretty steep to start with). Restaurants have doubled their cover charges, and added on an indemnity clause happen you make a reservation and don't turn up. Had an Indian venue done that, it would have been called exploitation of the helpless foreigner -- when Sydney does it, it is the natural consequences of hosting one million visitors.

The point is, and it merits underlining if I could figure out how to do underlining in email, that snafus will happen at any major event. It goes with the territory. When you have 136 countries (or even 13 countries, for that matter) sending hundreds of athletes, when you have a million plus additional visitors coming in, existing infrastructure is bound to be stretched, snafus are bound to crop up, things will go wrong no matter how developed you are, as a country.

Heck, come to think of it, remember the last Olympics, in Atlanta? In IBM's mother country, the Olympic scoring/timing system broke down, and caused pure mayhem. The transport system broke down. Luggage got lost. The food at the athletes' village got bad (if that was India, no problem, because the international teams would have come with truckloads of their own hygenically tinned baked beans and stuff). All this, and more, in the most advanced nation in the world.

So hey, isn't it about time the global media faced up to that reality? Isn't it time the global media woke up to the fact that no nation, no matter how developed or underdone it is, can host a huge event without the odd thing going haywire? Isn't it time the media stuck with reporting the facts, without seeing in every snafu an opportunity for some Third World bashing?

And finally, isn't it time we readers did something about this? Like, for instance, the next time the media attached to a visiting team cribs about traffic on Indian roads, maybe a gentle reminder to the writer that an athlete, a foreign athlete at that, was killed in a senseless road accident in Sydney might help? Like, the next time a visiting cricket media complains of umpiring, a helpful checklist of umpiring errors that occured on their own native soil could serve as a much-needed aide memoire?

Can we get some reason, and sense, back into reporting? Can we get back to the days when a news story was meant to inform and enlighten, not to air the writer's personal and racial prejudices like so much unwashed underclothes?

Prem

Mail Cricket Editor