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Mandatory broadcaster's warning?

Events of last week were tragic and bizarre by turns, and were so wrought with the absurd, but yet in summation we have to say that it's the media that took the cake. British broadcasting probably had its sorriest hour yet since its creation.

The Beeb represented by Dumeetha Luthra in this country, hurriedly divested itself of even a thin cloak of credibility.

Luthra was either amnesic, or just plain sick. But whichever, her tactic of painting the aggressor as the victim and victim as aggressor backfired to the background noise of Claymore mines going off with a base thud.

Luthra used the BBC's frequencies to paint a tableau of mass exodus, her figures of alleged Tamil homeless resulting from Sri Lankan armed forces actions running in the region of a 40 thousand.

The static had not died on those BBC frequencies before Ulf Henricsson, the new to the job SLMM chief said these figures appeared to have been overblown to the point of the hyperbolic. There were just 16,000 living in Sampoor he said, and of those a fraction had left their homes. Ten civilians may have died.

Luthra's calculated-to-malign kind of reporting doubtlessly exaggerated and underlined those deaths, with the vocal equivalent of a red pen scrawl. Ten civilian deaths in a suicide bomb attack are deaths too. Relatives don't grieve less for people blown up by suicide bomb, than they do for those that happen in the way of ariel sortie.

We get the feeling the grand old dames and gentlemen of the Beeb must be turning in their graves, listening to this slapstick improvised performance in broadcast journalism. But, that's not quite our business.

This BBC woman is a busybody with a cause, which is probably her own. She probably calculates that she can saturate airwaves with trumped-up casualty figures, and make her grandmother or somebody in England feel that their poster girl's is the voice for some momentous history in the making. In her head, she seems to be living Hollywood.

BBC was not moulded in that tradition of the horror movie, and often, its not in idle prattle that the Beeb was referred to as the staid old dependable institution.

Not any more, with BBC last week going miles off target in terms of accuracy and leagues more off centre in terms of objectivity and plain old-fashioned fairness.

British broadcasting was amnesic because it took ball-by-ball commentary approaches to a subject that goes by the description of war reporting. If the first ball bowled was a cowardly terrorist attack there is no way that the next ball could be framed in the lens in isolation of the previous delivery.

The first event of the week was an audacious suicide attack that was a strike of terror at the heartland taking the lives of more than a dozen innocent civilians, some of them pregnant mothers, which was followed by Lankan Airforce ariel sortie in Sampoor in an act of self defence. The BBC's reporting missed that point fatuously and consistently with every burst of trans satellite static.

In these terms, the Beeb peep-show was hard to imitate, yet, we had CNN talking of a brave suicide attack, almost oxymoronically and certainly moronically. (We were told of that CNN caper by a reader.) "Colombo government" is the appended description reserved for the Rajapakse administration, which having been called chauvinist at the beginning, takes these slights now in its stride.

The President nor his government have been made irrelevant by the international media for all its efforts but its possible that we could put the world on notice and say that when some of these newscasters file their reports, they should slip that mandatory warning along saying "watching us could keep you severely misinformed." If the Surgeon General could issue a warning on a pack of cigarettes, there is no reason a broadcaster or agency cannot give fair danger signals over a pack of lies.

Civil society missed CC bus

We carried considerable comment over the last few weeks on the subject of the Constitutional Commissions (CC). There may be a case to discuss the issue of the CCs as it's situated today in the public discourse. But, the way the issues are being framed is objectionable, and wouldn't withstand any test for fairness, in or out of a courtroom.

The move for securing the CC by President's directive (he appointed some of the Commissioners to Commissions under purview of the CC) has come for attack, but the antecedents of the Presidential action remains obscured.

None who hector us on the "rule of Law" or the "independence of the commissioners" have time of day however, for how things happened and how legislation framed hurriedly made the process of constituting the commissions a farce.

A clumsily framed debate is no proper basis for an informed public discourse, and before we move along in terms of discussing the issue in the public space, minimum conditions for an informed discourse are imperative.

Rooftop orators for a start could get down from the rafters, and upon reaching terra firma, should write down how we reached point A from point B in the journey of installing the CC and the independent commissions in the first place.

Even those who say that they want to hang the President for what he did, never probably realized that even if they do hang him, they would be back to square one if the entire process of appointments continues to pose intractable problems for the legislature. In the CCs, we have the classic case of solution fast deteriorating to become the problem.

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