Media freedom?
Even as you
open the newspapers on Sunday morning, please pause to reflect whether
what you will read is reliable, informative and enriching. Why? Two
prominent politicians last week publicly questioned the progress of
media freedom in the country.
JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayaka charged in a public speech that
certain business interests were bribing media houses to suppress
reportage of his recent speech in Parliament on issues of massive
corruption, especially in relation to the Avant Garde arms issue.
Meanwhile, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has claimed in a news
statement that was mainly aimed at defending his position in the
on-going corruption investigations, that there is no ‘full’ media
freedom in the country.
Mr. Dissanayaka’s own understanding of news media must surely be
fashioned by his Marxian philosophy that would attribute all industries,
including the news industry, as being under the sway of the capitalist
class and, to that degree, not serving the interests of the rest of
society, be it information or any other social need. If that radical
political perspective is, indeed, Mr. Dissanayaka’s frame of analysis,
then why should he expect anything else from the news industry?
Surely, it should be unrealistic for a Marxian revolutionary to
expect the capitalist news industry to give him much public prominence.
At the same time, the news industry would not need to be ‘bribed’ to
‘suppress’ his speech. Rather, it would be logical capitalist class
tactics as practised by the news industry itself. The fact is, however,
that many media outlets, including this newspaper, did publish or
broadcast Mr. Dissanayaka’s speech. This newspaper published his speech
in the House in full as a matter of public interest.
The very fact that the leader of the JVP actually complained that the
news media was bribed to suppress his speech means that, Marxian or not,
he has begun to expect the media to carry out its function of informing
the public in a manner that goes beyond the mere machinations of
capitalist class hegemony. It means that the JVP leadership has softened
its radicalism and has begun to perceive the institutions and dynamics
of modern society as being something more than simply factors in class
struggle.
This softening of ideology is in keeping with the JVP’s gradual
transformation into a political party immersed in parliamentary
politics. Just as much as the JVP now champions parliamentary democracy
– bourgeois or not – it has also begun acknowledging the vital role of
the news media in that democracy. As a movement of politically conscious
activists drawn from a range of social sectors with a heritage of heroic
struggle for the freedom and rights of the ordinary people, the JVP must
be welcomed into the mainstream.
Of the claim by the former President regarding a mysterious ‘full’
media freedom, we leave it to the readers to make their own assessment
in the fullness of time. Read on, the newspaper.
Palestine
The profound human tragedy that is Palestine seems to be just getting
worse and worse and not better, despite all the ‘missions’ and
‘negotiations’ and, rulings by the United Nations. It was bad enough
that a totally foreign population – of Europeans – were forcibly
introduced with the help of the Western colonial powers at the turn of
the 19th century and during the early decades of the 20th. It was bad
enough that those same Western powers – all the while exhorting
‘democracy’ to the rest of the world – continued, in the aftermath of
European ‘Holocaust’ against the Jews, to militarily support the Zionist
State to impose its legal writ on a large slab of former Palestinian
land.
All that was bad enough. What has happened since then? Even if the
traumatized Palestinian people – Islamic and Christian – have, since
1967, agreed to consider the new State of Israel as a legal entity, have
they been able to establish their own State? And has that ‘State of
Israel’ ceased its aggressive expansion of territory to further plant
new Jewish settlements in the dwindling lands yet lived on by the
Palestinians? Both questions have to be answered in the negative despite
successive wars, successive so-called ‘negotiations’ and successive
desperate ‘intifada’.
The responsibility for this profound failure in geo-political
management must squarely lie on the big powers that have, for decades,
insisted on their ‘role’ as mediators and strategic partners in bringing
peace and justice to the region. The very same big powers that insist
that Israel should cease all further settlements – totally illegal under
UN law – remain inactive even as Israel ignores the UN requirements and
persists with the settlements. Worse, those same ‘mediators’ have,
paradoxically, continued with their massive military support which is
the sole means by which the Zionist State imposes and defends these
settlements.
The latest crude manoeuvres to legitimize Israeli control over the
heart of Palestine, the Al Aqsa mosque, can only be seen as no more than
a knife cruelly twisted in the bleeding wound of the people of the
region. Only the people of the region – Jewish, Islamic, Christian,
Arab, Israeli, Palestinian – know how much suffering this wounding
causes. Might continues to be ‘right’ in this Holy Land.
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