By now, e veryone who follows cricket should have heard something about the series of incidents involving Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh. This blog doesn’t concern cricket, so I’m not going to get into it but if you’re not familiar with it, then I’m sure a search of Technorati or Google will fill you in on all the necessary details.
However, the concern of this blog is the ways in which different sections of the media have dealt with the incident. The mass media dealt with the incident in such a way that the issue became political, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Governor-General Michael Jeffery commenting on the issue. It almost became a diplomatic issue as well, with suggestions that relations between India and Australia were strained because of the incident. There was also restraint shown by media operators who would have suffered financially if India refused to play anymore cricket on the tour, namely PBL Media and News Corporation, and the publications and services operated by these two companies were less critical towards India than other media operators such as Fairfax were.
However, a completely different slant on the issue could be found online at Youtube. The video depicts a man dressed as a monkey running onto the field dressed as a monkey, dancing and rolling around and evading security staff at the Adelaide Oval for as long as possible. The video then ends with an editorial, stating that the incident between Harbhajan and Symonds should have stayed on the field, it didn’t need to be dragged through the media and consequently the general public had no right to be involved in it. Cricket is a passionate game played with intencity and occasionally in the heat of the moment things are said that shouldn’t be, but ultimately it is a form of entertainment, and having fun while playing the game should be a key element. In a stunt that wouldn’t look out of place on The Chaser this group attempted to show the lighter side of the incident and bring some fun back into a cricket series that had become overtly politicised.
Whether a majority of Australian or Indian cricket fans would agree with this group’s interpretation of the incident, it is diffucult to say. But from a new media point of view, it is interesting to see this sardonic interpretation of the incident coming through a piece of user-generated content while the mass media was concerned with the politics and diplomacy angles of the story. The reasons why the mass media strayed away from portraying the incident in this way are also interesting. Perhaps if The Chaser had been on air at the time they would have made light of it, but every active section of the mass media was treating the whole incident very carefully indeed.
