The Great Indian News Trick
The Hoot excerpts a passage from Nalin Mehta’s India on Television.
Selected and introduced by SUBARNO CHATTARJI
Interpreting Media
September 2010
As part of The Hoot’s continuing commitment toward creating greater media awareness and fostering debates related to media issues we are excerpting a passage from Nalin Mehta’s India on Television. New extracts will be posted on the site every month and readers are invited to send in comments, book recommendations, and reviews.
Nalin Mehta’s study while filling the ‘satellite-size gap in the scholarship of Indian television’ analyses the local and global nature of India’s television industry. He focuses on the economic, political, and cultural factors that determine programming and content and the implications thereof. The first extract discusses the central role and value of cricket and cricket-related programmes on Indian television. Mehta looks at how and why news channels have created cricket centred slots and the ways in which these have contributed to news television being ‘cricketised’. In the process Mehta offers insights into the complex relationship between cricket and the nation.
Nalin Mehta. India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008.
393 pages/Hardback: Rs. 495 (978-81-7223-726-4)
Excerpted with permission of Harper Collins.
The great Indian news trick: satellite television and cricket
Why Cricket? Economics and the Nation
The reasons for this concentrated focus on cricket lie within the economic structure of Indian television. Television has to be understood by looking at the industry’s business model because revenue flows effectively define the parameters of programming. The key feature of the Indian satellite market is its origin as an illegal medium, which has led to the most unique distribution system in the world. ... Even though direct-to-home broadcasting systems had begun to make inroads into this television economy by 2005, a significant proportion of television signals are distributed through local cable operators who do not share correct information on the number of households serviced by them. This means that most broadcasters cannot really pinpoint how many viewers are actually viewing their channels. Once a cable operator has decoded the broadcasters signal it can be supplied to as many people as he wants and the broadcaster has no way of knowing the numbers. ‘It is estimated that local cable operators declare only about 5–20 per cent of the households on their network to broadcasters who receive only 10 per cent of total subscription fees as against globally accepted distribution standards between 30–40 per cent.’47 The only country that comes close to India in this regard is Taiwan and it is this factor that makes Indian television completely different. While there were an estimated 68 million satellite connections in India by 2006, 48 ‘no media company is being paid for more than eight–10 million homes…only about 15 per cent of homes are reported and that is the money that comes back to the broadcaster’. 49
This has huge implications for the business models of Indian broadcasters. They have to depend far more on advertising than their counterparts in most other television markets. It must be noted that all Indian channels work on business models where, roughly speaking, they earn 70–80 per cent of their earnings from advertising and only 20–30 per cent from subscriptions. This is the reverse of what happens in most developed television markets and it means that broadcasters are even more dependent on daily ratings to get the advertising rupee. In the absence of control over distribution, television ratings become the only means of determining which programmes are being watched and which should, therefore, receive advertising. The importance of ratings is further accentuated by the fact that most news channels are free-to-air and do not charge any subscription to begin with. Their dependence on advertising, and by extension on the ratings, is total. ... The TAM rating sample is minuscule and it only represents urban markets—the rural market is not represented at all.51 Yet, in a world where more than 50 news channels compete with each other the only way to stay in the game is to remain high on the rating meters.
Given the narrow base of these ratings, cricket has emerged as an easy option to register on them. Cricket, along with Bollywood, has a pan-Indian appeal cutting across socio-economic and regional categories. News of a small-town crime in Mathura may not interest anybody in Kerala but news of the Indian cricket team interests people in every region of India. This is why when news editors want to lift the ratings of any show they look towards cricket. Star’s Uday Shankar who also initiated the genre of cricket programming, draws a deep connection between cricket and national identity to explain its emergence as a prime attraction on television, even more so than Bollywood:
I think as far as Indian identity is concerned, cricket overtakes even Bollywood. While Bollywood is a big source of entertainment, its conscious articulation as an Indian medium by the common people is not so pronounced. But cricket is perhaps consciously the most nationalistic activity that Indians indulge in. So to that extent, there is no cricket minus India. Every time that you watch cricket you are sub-consciously or consciously reminded of the Indian identity…Now in terms of importance, cricket has left Bollywood far behind. It is next only to big political stories and really big economic stories… And very often it overtakes political and economic stories as well. 52
This is why cricket sells and is big on news television. Shankar’s equation of cricket with Indian nationalism is revealing. Certainly, this is a link that that sociologists and historians have stressed, ever since C.L.R. James inaugurated the discipline of sport history with the statement: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ Presaging the rise of modern sport history and sociology, his classic Beyond a Boundary stressed how cricket either helped form or supplemented social practices based on the intersecting lines of colour and class in colonial and post-colonial societies.53 It initiated the study of sport as a relational idiom, as a magnifying glass amplifying the values, symbols, fissures and tensions of a society. Indian cricket literature, in the past decade, has taken this line of enquiry and a great deal of scholarship has stressed its political dimension. There is no doubt that cricket’s hegemony on television is tied to nationalism, and television, for its own purposes, has played a big role. As Arjun Appadurai has noted:
…television has now completely transformed cricket culture in India. As several commentators have pointed out, cricket is perfectly suited for television, with its many pauses, its spatial concentration of action, and its extended format. For audiences as well as advertisers it is the perfect television sport.54
Cricket’s sheer length and complexity makes it one of the most tele-friendly games on the planet. For instance, a TAM study in 2002 found that in comparison to soccer, cricket offered far greater and more effective opportunities for advertisers—in the stadium as well as on television.55 This partly explains why in 2001 as many as 473 brands were advertised in 16,400 advertising spots on cricket programmes.56 For television in general, cricket is a predictable news event, for which advertising can be bought and sold well in advance. For news television in particular, cricket’s centrality to notions of Indian identity offers an opportunity to capture audiences and advertising. This is why news television has been cricketised.
Television focus on cricket as a spectacle has reinforced the link between cricket and what Appadurai calls the ‘erotics of nationhood’:
…cricket, through the enormous convergence of state, media, and private-sector interests, has come to be identified with ‘India’, with ‘Indian’ skill, ‘Indian’ guts, ‘Indian’ team spirit, and ‘Indian’ victories, the bodily pleasure that is at the core of the male viewing experience is simultaneously part of the erotics of nationhood. This erotics, particularly for working-class and lumpen male youth throughout India, is connected deeply to violence, not just because all agonistic sport taps the inclination to aggressiveness but because the divisive demands of class, ethnicity, language, and region in fact make the nation a profoundly contested community. The erotic pleasure of watching cricket for Indian male subjects is the pleasure of agency in an imagined community, which in many other arenas is violently contested.57
Notes
47. E&Y-FICCI, The Indian Entertainment Industry, p 37.
48. National Readership Survey 2006, NRS 2006 Press Release-Key Findings, p 4.
49. Interview with Avinash Kaul, sr. vice –president, strategic planning and marketing, NDTV Media, Mumbai, 14 January 2005.
51. TAM data represents only Class I towns – towns with a population of more than 1,00,000. Interview with Atul Phadnis.
52. Emphasis in Shankar’s. Interview with Uday Shankar, CEO and editor, Star News, 2003-07, Shanghai, 22 Aug. 2005.
53. C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson), 1963.
54. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p 101.
57. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p 111.