Spotlight on games and sports at their finest

Nilratan Halder | Published: August 05, 2022 22:16:38

The national newspapers in Bangladesh have started to become slimmer. How the readers whose number is likely to decrease with the increase in price by Tk 2.0 on an average are reacting to this may be an interesting query. At a time when newspaper subscribers are becoming a species in decline, the higher price may prove to be a disincentive to retention of readership, let alone its further boost.
There should have been a serious study on this issue. Covid-19 dealt a serious blow to subscribers' readership habit. Some families started to discontinue subscribing newspapers because they could not afford following their job loss or reduced salaries; others were apprehensive if newspapers carried along with those the virus. This is despite the fact that the Newspaper Owners' Association of Bangladesh (NOAB) assured readers by putting up ads on the front page that newspapers did not carry virus.
The other problem with newspaper readership concerns social sites which have been bombarding the new generations with information and misinformation so much that they discover themselves in a virtual world of trance. To them a newspaper has hardly any appeal. But they are least aware of the difference between fact and fiction. They accept anything as true if it corresponds to their longing.
This brings us to the grave issue of the economy of the print media and the future of newspapers in particular. But those are weighty subjects requiring deep study. Here the focus is on one particular matter the national newspapers are not doing enough justice to. It is the maintenance of diversity in contents and particularly relating to news about sports and games.
The newspapers here give the impression that there are hardly any sport or game other than cricket and football. Accepted that cricket and football are highly popular in this country but that does not mean either of these two should get coverage of 70 to 80 per cent space of the sport page. This has been happening for the past weeks even when newspapers became slimmer and the Commonwealth Games opened. One or two newspapers have been confining sports and cultural or better say sliver-screen news to just one single page, allocating half to each.
Clearly newspapers need to be multi-dimensional. But the shrinking sports news is a concerning development particularly at a time when the Commonwealth Games 2022 is going on in full swing in Birmingham, England. The newspapers in general here are ignoring this as if they could not care less. Why? Even the World Athletics Championships 2022 held in Oregon, USA, did receive some attention from newspapers in Bangladesh. Although it was not enough, yet there were few pieces of sporadic news on that meet.
Events at the Commonwealth Games meet are rarely covered. Whatever little coverage they receive concerns mainly the performances by a handful of Bangladesh participants. Their performances are mostly disappointing. As if the newspapers do not like to disappoint readers further, they just carry short and single column news on the athletes.
It is more like a compartmentalisation of sports. Understood that sports enthusiasts can watch the games on television. But it is a fact that the majority of viewers do not have access to facilities that bring home the coverage of games on the screen. The media can play a role of catalyst for creating craze for a particular game or games. Cricket is a prime example. But Olympics or World Athletics Championships are a class of their own. They bring out the ultimate human capacity and the soaring spirit that prompt athletes to go beyond the physical limitations.
Indifference to such exercises at their finest only exposes the myopic vision that never helps inspire the youths here to set sight on benchmarks set by sportspersons at the highest level. This leaves a nation dwarfed. Sport are not merely sports, they are part of human race's cultural fruition too. Even tiny island nations produce the fastest man and woman on this planet. There is no point suffering from a sense of psychological inferiority.
Cultivation of talents can do the trick even for sports and game-wise backward nations like us. In archery, Bangladesh has shown its potential. Other areas of games and sports have to be explored. Unless the media give prominent coverage, how will young children get attracted to sports. The fact must be admitted that interests in or craze for outdoor sports are a panacea for many of the social ills now raging as a pandemic. Let the newspaper direct a wide-angle focus on meets like the Commonwealth Games where athletes from microscopic island countries in the Indian and Pacific Oceans or Africa compete, some of them winning medals. If they can, so can Bangladesh provided that a condition is created for young aspirants to set their targets in diverse disciplines.