Cricket as news and cricket as commerce

Midweek this week, NDTV 24/7 carried an item about the Indian team on the eve of its departure to the West Indies. Viewers were shown Shahrukh Khan spraying fizzy drink about with a selection of Indian players in blue uniforms watching. To start with I thought that this was some manner of farewell bash that Shahrukh had hosted for the team which NDTV was running as a celebrity news segment. (Aside: Shahrukh looked little in a shot with Yuvraj Singh looming behind him. Small and sort of unsparky.)

Then Priyanka Chopra turned up on screen and declared that she wanted the team to win the World Cup. After voicing this unexceptionable sentiment, she pumped her fist and went: “Rah, Rah, India etc.” in a canned way and I thought, hey, that sounds familiar. My children clarified: the cheer-leading lines were from Pepsi’s cricket commercials. The fizz being hosed about wasn’t sparkling wine but a new drink called Pepsi Gold. Pepsi, the sponsor of the Indian team, was cannily launching a product and milking its cricket cow at the same time. I understand why Pepsi would want to do this, but what was NDTV thinking? Why would a news channel, specially one that sees sobriety and a sense of proportion as its USP, be running a promotional event as news?

There’s a general problem here. I called a friend in NDTV who explained that it was getting harder, while covering entertainment and sport, to draw a line between news manufactured by sponsors and ‘real’ news because nearly every event in these areas was stage-managed or underwritten by some company or the other. It’s certainly getting harder for the viewer (or reader) of news. The Times of India acknowledges that it sells editorial space, only it doesn’t tell the reader which parts of the ‘news’ that he’s reading have been paid for. I’m not suggesting that NDTV or any other channel gets paid for coverage: what I am saying is that in a cutthroat environment, the fear of being left out has television news rooms aiming cameras at trashy non-events.

Much better to watch cricket footage that you know has been paid for. There’s a glorious Nike commercial playing on Indian television channels, set in a crowded Indian street. The traffic’s stilled by a snarl-up; boys swarm up buses and trucks to play on their roofs. Sreesanth gets out of a car to watch, an elephant fields, a truck-top batsmen is hit by a rising ball where his box would have been, the traffic starts to move but an intrepid, fired-up lad runs in and, heedless of the pitch that moves beneath his feet, launches himself into his pre-delivery leap. The frame freezes mid-leap, leaving the boy suspended in air: Just Do It.

It's a terrific little film. Currently, the cricket in the commercials feels more real than the cricket in the news.