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.