Despite new focus, media misses the darker story about women in sports

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 9, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/03/09/despite-new-focus-media-misses-the-darker-story-about-women-in-sports

While mainstream media continues to focus on games politicians play, this column will focus on the games women play, as in cricket, tennis, football, hockey, athletics, etc., and how the media covers their struggles and achievements.

International Women’s Day (IWD) has just gone by and women in India are being praised, their successes celebrated even as they continue to be targeted for consumer goods, or continue to suffer ‘mansplaining’ as erudite ‘experts’, usually all men, hold forth on what should be done to promote women’s WDequality. All of this has become an annual and rather predictable ritual.

But even this ritualistic acknowledgement of one day for women was not the norm earlier. In fact, I can recall in the mid-eighties, when I worked for a national daily newspaper, trying to persuade my editor to carry an editorial to mark the day. This was a time when Indian women’s groups were on the streets demanding changes in laws that affected women such as rape and dowry. To his credit, the editor did agree that the day was worthy of an editorial comment. 

Now, although IWD is readily acknowledged, for the rest of the year, it would appear that no day is women’s day as the majority of Indian women continue to fight against misogyny, sexual harassment at the workplace, violence in their homes and on the street, unequal pay, low employment, poverty and much more.  

Yet, some things are changing, slowly. One cannot help but notice the sudden spurt in coverage of women in sports in the print media. Has the media suddenly woken up to the fact that these women also deserve attention? More likely, however, the attention is a consequence of big money finally backing some women’s sports, such as cricket.

There’s little doubt that the Women’s Premier League has catapulted women’s cricket to the top of the sports pages. Women have been playing cricket for a while, and doing well. But rarely did they get the kind of media attention they are getting today. 

Before the WPL, the U-19 Women’s cricket team won the World Cup. The Indian Express wrote about their victory in their lead story on the sports page with an unfortunate headline.

“First Ladies”. Ladies? Really? These are determined and plucky women who have fought to play a sport they love and excelled in it. “Ladies” is hardly the appropriate way to describe them. 

Fortunately, the rest of the page told a different story as reports about individual players revealed that most of these women came from so-called “humble beginnings” (a cliché that has been bleached of all meaning). Not only did they struggle to find financial resources to train but they also had to fight the embedded misogyny in Indian society that holds back young girls from pursuing their dreams such as recounted in this story about bowling all-rounder Archana Devi.

Archana’s story exemplifies in many ways the story of women’s sports in India today. Unlike individual sports like tennis or badminton, team sports like hockey, football, and cricket as well as athletics attract women from less-privileged backgrounds. Each story you hear after they succeed speaks of their struggle to first overcome familial opposition, then convince a sports association to give them a chance.

• 

In this important story on women’s sports, Shivani Naik of Indian Express, writes about the results of a recent survey of women in sports. It revealed that sports women had to overcome “poor access to sports facilities, no equipment to play, having to travel more than 10 km to reach the facility, safety concerns, lack of preferred female coaches, unsafe travelling to tournaments and discrimination in sport”. Apart from this was the perennial issue of lack of toilets and even safe drinking water.

In Bihar, women athletes who chose to wear shorts while training as they were more comfortable rather than salwars had to contend with men who “would surround the group and stare, which could get intimidating”. 

These are stories that need to be excavated and reported by the media. They are a necessary reality check on women’s sports in India. While the individual stories of the women who succeed are important, as they play a role in encouraging other women who dream of making a career in sports, the difficult conditions sportswomen face once they have taken the first steps, also need to be highlighted.  

Apart from this, there is also a darker story about women’s sports that emerges occasionally, and then disappears.

This year, the sensational accusations made by leading women wrestlersagainst the head of the Wrestling Federation of India, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, once again forced open the hidden world of sexual harassment in sports. There have been numerous other instances reported over the years. Some of them have received passing attention from the media but not enough to compel those in authority to act. This time, the women wrestlers who are speaking out will not be silenced. 

That these young women who come away from their homes for training in various sporting facilities are vulnerable goes without saying. As this editorial in The Tribune points out: “Young female athletes, often coming from an underprivileged background and staying at a sports training centre far away from home, stay silent as sports federation officials and coaches possess complete authority over their career and future. In team events, this can lead to the axing of a sportsperson who spurns the advances of a coach or an official; in individual sports, such a strong-willed player can be penalised citing indiscipline or lack of fitness.” 

Also, as Anupriya, a former cricketer writes in this article in Scroll, “Due to the historical ties of powerful politicians to sporting bodies, and the revenue sports provide to media institutions, there is almost an incentivised culture of hushing up whistleblowing. Indian athletes will always be vulnerable because the very nature and structure of sports rely on conforming to established norms and existing within the ecosystem.”

Sharda Ugra, one of the first women journalists to cover sports, reminds us how even when sexual harassment charges surface, they are addressed or rather not in this article in espncrickinfo. She refers to a 2018 incident when two women cricketers complained about the inappropriate behaviour of a senior Board of Control for Cricket India (BCCI) official. 

Ugra writes: “The whole exercise, undertaken with correct protocol and procedure, was, however, pitted with mishaps and missteps, in deed, language and public perception. It could become a case study for every corporation in the public eye as to how not to behave when attempting to follow the rule book in response to allegations of sexual harassment against their top brass. A case study also on why women in any industry find it hard to lodge any formal protest against powerful men in their business.”

Perhaps it is expecting the impossible to believe that a media, fuelled by the same corporations that back some sports, would be willing to expose the way these sports federations, often run by powerful politicians, deal with issues like sexual harassment. But after the attention drawn to the issue by the women wrestlers, I would suggest that this is a story that needs more media exposure.

Also, this would be an appropriate time for the media to introspect about the way women’s sports have been covered so far. In the past, coverage has swung between outright misogyny, where the only interest in women who played sport was in how they looked or dressed, to one where they got sporadic attention when a team, or an individual, did well. Today, despite a spurt of interest in women’s sports, for the most, sports pages continue to be dominated by men’s sports, including coverage of even minor tournaments. Surely this must change.

From tsunami to Turkey earthquake: The role of media during natural disasters

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 23, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/02/23/from-tsunami-to-turkey-the-role-of-media-during-natural-disasters

Long after the rubble has been cleared, there remain stories that still must be written. Not just of lives lost, of injuries and damaged structures, but of the fault lines in our societies that show up in the wake of a natural disaster. 

For those of us who have witnessed earthquakes in India and reported on them, the coverage of the devastating serial earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria earlier this month brought back many memories. The details are different, but the trajectory of events is similar. As also the aftermath. 

The coverage of the earthquake’s impact in southern Turkey and Syria has posed many challenges for the media.  Even with the best of technology, how do you report in places with no electricity and poor connectivity, and capture the scale of the tragedy as it unfolds? How do you combine human interest while also respecting people’s right to privacy and dignity in the face of such a disaster? How do you report honestly on the lapses of the government in a country where press freedom has been whittled down drastically?

The challenges that the international, and more so the national media in Turkey have faced carry many lessons for us in India. This article in the Wire by Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu, a visiting professor at the department of media and communications, London School of Economics, makes many useful observations. She points out, for instance, that the “task of the media is not only to publish updates on search and rescue operations, but also to bring out the failures and errors”, and that “journalism cannot be done without asking questions about lack of equipment, water and electricity; journalists have to hold the powers that be accountable.” 

Yet, in Turkey – and, as we know, in India during the recent Covid pandemic – journalists are not encouraged to ask such questions. You risk interrogation or even arrest if you do.

While we can debate how much press freedom we have in India, the Turkish press under President Recep Erdogan is far from free. As this 2019 article in Columbia Journalism Review  points out, the Turkish press was never completely free even under other regimes. Journalists were imprisoned and newspapers critical of the government were shut down. 

But today, according to the author, “The destruction of Turkish media has come full circle. Where journalists once sought to expose what the government was up to, now they act at its behest to expose – even to help prosecute – their common ‘opposition.’ These days, if an independent journalist dares to write anything controversial, whether on social media or, say, to a foreign reporter...They will wait out the next 24 hours with trepidation, praying that Twitter trolls...Will not have chosen to make their statement the hysterical target of the day. Why would anyone risk saying anything at all, let alone reporting?” 

The consequence of this kind of fear is seen in the way disasters are reported.  International media plays out one story, the local media plays out another. While a foreign reporter might quote people saying that help did not arrive in time, a local reporter would be constrained in saying this because it is risky to report anything critical about the government. The people who suffer the consequences of such restricted reporting, of course, are those who are the victims of the disaster.

One of the factors that has emerged in Turkey is the poor quality of construction in some of the cities impacted by the earthquake. We saw the frightening visuals of what would be considered solid brick and concrete structures, collapsing like a pack of cards. This BBC report of buildings in one of the plushest areas in Gaziantep brings out the reality of shoddy construction, how early warnings were ignored, resulting in huge towers in this locality coming down. 

An architect tells the reporter that 65 percent of the building stock in Turkey is at risk. That is a frightening figure. It is also clear from such reports that apart from the builders who could be charged with using poor quality materials for the construction, the corruption in the system that allowed such subpar construction to be passed as safe is also at fault.  

Reading this, one cannot help but wonder what would happen in our cities in India in the face of such an earthquake. How many of the scores of rapidly built towers that now dot the urban landscape have features that will prevent them from collapsing as did those buildings in Turkey? Would any of these structures, often built in open violation of land use regulations and environmental rules, survive an earthquake? This is an opportune time for the Indian media to turn its gaze inwards and look at our own earthquake-preparedness. 

It is also telling that the Indian media chose to report the story from Turkey only after the government sent aid by way of personnel who could help in the rescue operations and, one presumes, accommodated some media teams.  These were the first person reports we read or saw.  But there is often a local politics involved when other countries rush to provide humanitarian aid. Were any of the reporters who flew to Turkey to report even aware of this?

Seema Guha, a veteran reporter, filed this insightful report in the latest issue of Outlook magazine, which incidentally has focused almost entirely on disasters.  She writes that when an earthquake struck Nepal in 2015, the government rushed in aid. It also accommodated media crews on the Air Force aircraft that flew in.  But within a week of this help being sent, Guha writes, “the appreciation turned into resentment. This had much to do with Indian media’s loud proclamation of New Delhi’s stellar role in the Nepal rescue and relief operations.” 

She quotes well-known Nepali journalist Kanak Dixit saying: “The best kind of disaster aid is quiet and altruistic, with no chest-thumping. India’s assistance during the April 2015 earthquake was prompt, but the way the Indian media tried to take credit for India was unnecessary and took away some of the shine of a good act in the eyes of the Nepali public”.

Good advice, but unlikely to be heeded by much of India’s mainstream media that has become “His Master’s Voice” in every sense of the word.

To conclude, please read this heart-rending piece in Outlook. It is a first-person account by journalist Kavin Mallar of what she experienced as a resident of Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu during and after the 2004 tsunami. The “after” stretched out over many years. Her story reminds us yet again that disasters don’t end once the rubble and the detritus is cleared.  They are a continuing saga of suffering and survival at so many levels, and of stories that remain untold.