Monthly Media Watch: Gender bias of Indian media

A couple of days ago Indian print media woken up all of a sudden to women hockey. It came in a big way, told the world how the Kazan bound women hockey team was put into trouble in the night at airport. We were told in the most fashionable way how lack of transit visa made the team return to hotel in the midnight after waiting painful hours.

We for once were delighted at Indian print media’s focus on women hockey, whose stars do not wear cleavage exposing gear and that’s why their images never appear in the papers you and I purchase.

The airport incident was a controversy, ok, the papers blew it up.

The same team that had seen unseen hardships day in and day out in their routine in the camp, goes to Kazan, whacks well prepared and well-oiled Belgium team 5-3 after conceding 2 early goals. Belgium team had been trained by Australian coaches. The same Belgium that spoilt the Indian broth a summer ago at the same city in the Olympic Qualifier and won the silver that time.

Why are we not told of this victory? Leading papers of India gave a good bye for this heartwarming performance.

Not only that. A junior Indian junior girls went to New Zealand, engaged their seniors in a test series, and behold the score of the first match was 3-2.

The Indian media did not report even the results.

Never carried by the internet editions of newspapers which dutifully displays agency report of every sort.

Not that one has to put in lot of efforts to get the results of these two engagements. New Zealand and Kazan are not run by the IHF or a heavenly UFO called Hockey India where you won’t even have a website to know results.

NZHF and FIH are covering the events respectively, and you get instant results.

Why then the Samaritans in the press, who don’t leave any occasion to sing the gender equality and alike, did not even publish these results?

Only they can reply.

To that extent what we knew is they were awake late night to get the details of Pak-SL T20 finals, and had they sent two minutes inbetween they would have got the results of the women teams as well.

But, ok, oh some ladies are playing attitude is not good for media.