The Mumbai Mirror’s cover story on November 28th 2007 is a textbook case of how a ambiguously sourced story is damaging. There are several problems with this story. The most obvious one is that it does not name sources. “Senior players” – a phrase flogged to death by the press much like the phrase “BCCI officials” is ambigious, and most crucially drags in anybody who may qualify as a “senior” player. It makes no allowance for the possibility that certain senior players may infact be in favor of Kirsten – or more simply, that there may be various different personal opinions amongst the senior players about the selection of the coach. Further, who are the “senior players”? Kumble, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman? Are Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan also amongst the “senior” players? Is Dhoni who captains the ODI side a “senior” player? It could be speculated with some merit therefore that 8 out of the 11 that played the Kolkata Test are “senior players”. Is it reasonable on the part of the Mumbai Mirror to assume that all these senior players (the number ranges from 4-8 by any reasonable standard) are all of exactly the same mind? The Mirror has also used that classic non-source “a source close to the team” who reveals the following:
“Even Niranjan Shah, who is one of the seven members of the high-profile committee was kept in the dark about the meeting and so were the senior players. Prof Ratnakar Shetty called Anil Kumble and he was asked to proceed to BCCI president Sharad Pawar’s home at 6, Janpath and then introduced to Kirsten,”
And yet, in Cricinfo’s story by Nagraj Gollapudi about the coach selection issue on 27th November states the following:
“Kirsten was interviewed in Delhi by the coach selection committee, comprising former captains Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri and S Venkataraghavan, BCCI joint secretary MP Pandove, treasurer N Srinivasan and secretary Niranjan Shah. Anil Kumble, India’s test captain, was also present at the meeting. The committee had decided to expedite the process with the intention of appointing a coach before the tour of Australia next month.”
So we have 2 sources – one “unnamed” and another “close to the team” who contradict each other. The first insinuates that there was something underhanded about the process itself, while the other says that the coach selection committee interviewed Kirsten and that the Captain of the Test team was also present. In their obsession with unnamed sources, the reporter for the Mumbai Mirror ignores or doesn’t realize the one really interesting question here – If Kumble was invited, why was Dhoni not invited? What does that say about the position of the ODI captain? Of course the story doesn’t concern itself with this.
So, we don’t know who the senior players are, or how many they are. Neither do we know why there is blatant contradiction between two reports about the same alleged meeting. Here is further demonstration of why the story in the Mumbai Mirror is of such poor quality. Cricinfo’s story on December 3 by Neil Manthorp about this issue starts off by saying:
“Gary Kirsten has delayed accepting the position of India’s coach after hearing about alleged “unhappiness” among some senior players about him being offered the job.”
Anyone who reads that statement could be forgiven for believing that “some senior players” (a qualification – “some”, that Mumbai Mirror does not make) are unhappy with the BCCI’s choice for coach. This is completely different from saying that the senior players think that any head coach is unnecessary! Yet, given the nature of Mumbai Mirror’s story, it is possible to see why Manthorp interprets it as he does.
These are some of the problems that arise when poor quality cricket press being allowed a free hand with the senior bosses at BCCI (i refer to the President, Secretary, Treasurer and the Vice-Presidents). In part it is BCCI’s fault that they do not put out a single coherent message. Shunning the press amounts to damage control, it cannot be a policy.
Mumbai Mirror’s story (a cover story no less) was written by “A special correspondent” – a further smokescreen. Nobody in the mainstream press – nobody who gets paid to report the news is going to criticize this type of story, which is commonly seen in the cricket press. With BCCI not having a spokesman, there is even more confusion. Today, Gary Kirsten has accepted the job. Will anybody ask Mumbai Mirror what happened to the senior players making the case to BCCI? Will they pursue this and run the story? If indeed there was discord in the team about Kirsten’s appointment, then surely it is worth pursuing as a story. Did the senior players make their case to BCCI? What came of it?
Mumbai Mirror has used articles from this blog in the past when they used to take posts from various blogs about issues of the day and post them on their website, while providing links back to the source blogs. I should point out that on no occasion did they correspond with this author about using those blog posts. One could debate the merits of such a practice on the part of the Mumbai Mirror, but that is not the reason why i raise this. If someone at Mumbai Mirror still reads this blog, will they infact respond to this criticism of their cover story?
I wonder…..
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