The just-elected office bearers of the BCCI might have shown some interest in improving its relationship with the media, but the Indian cricket team management continued to keep its distance from the touring national media contingent with members of the fourth estate being banned from entering the hotel premises, here on Thursday.
While in places like Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and Hamilton, media people did have access to the hotel lobby, the authorities of the ‘Heritage Hotel’ here are very strict about even letting media people be within 100 metres of the premises. It is not known whether the authorities are issued a diktat by the Indian team management, which is known to keep the media at arm’s length, but there was an altercation between reporters of some electronic channels today when they were filming the proceedings of movements in the hotel from across the road.
It was learnt that some of the security staff of the hotel came and told them to move from the area even though the public road or footpath is not under their jurisdiction. Even as some of the media people wanted to have refreshments at the hotel’s coffee shop, they were told that if they are not staying in the hotel in no uncertain terms they won’t be allowed inside.
Since the relation between players and media had hit nadir during the current World Cup, it is absolutely possible that players and the support staff have told the hotel members to bar the media as some of the channels have been doing a paparazzi on the cricketers following them from sea beach to salon.
Half a billion tune in to WC Mumbai: With India’s winning streak extending to a record nine matches in the World Cup, the viewership for the 50-over showpiece event has risen to over half-a-billion in the cricket crazy country. The league stage figures post three weeks of the quadrennial event have touched 534 million viewers after the first 29 matches.
After getting record-breaking TRPs in India’s first two wins against Pakistan and South Africa, the Mahendra Singh Dhoni-led side once again made the fans stay glued to their television sets with a 13.1 TVR rating sccross Star network and DD. 262 million viewers (TAM data CS4+ extrapolated to the universe using a standard conversion factor) tuned in to watch India chase down the West Indies’ total to register their fourth consecutive win in this edition.
Viewers across the country cheered for Team India across multiple feeds with Hindi, English and Tamil emerging as the preferred languages. Hindi and regional language contribution remained high with 80 per cent of the viewership coming from non-English feed.