Columns

They are back at the same old crap game. This revivalist tendency when the media is hung out to dry or beaten with President Sirisena’s favourite instrument of ‘torture’- the madu walge (stingray tail)- has happened several times since Sirisena and Wickremesinghe joined hands to practise yahapalana governance.

Admittedly Sirisena’s threat to resort to his own version of a one-man Spanish Inquisition is, of course, all metaphorical. How can one expect a devout Buddhist like President Sirisena to encourage corporal punishment though a return to capital punishment after all these years is not too far away.

Maybe he picked up the idea of hanging a few drug dispensers (no not pharmacists) after rubbing shoulders with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during one of his numerous globe-skirting tours. Though there are critics of Sirisena’s constant foreign travels ( with or without his progeny) as though the end of the world or his own time is nigh, as being of little use to the nation, I do believe that travel broadens the mind. How else would he have picked up the idea that the real solution to the drug menace is to hang a few importers and assorted distributors. Meanwhile the real wheeler- dealers would be in their penthouse homes or parading around Diyawanna Oya in their luxury vehicles bought on ill-gotten earnings.

I doubt that President Sirisena would go to the extent of seeing some journalists hanging from the kaju puhulang tree. He won’t know the old ditty. True he came from Royal College but from Parakramabahu territory not from Colombo where horses used to run.
But then desperate times call for desperate solutions and with crucial elections not too far away why not pick on that perennial target, the media.

What irks political leaders most is when the barbs of criticism strike at their vainglorious pre –election promises and the largely empty achievements three years later. Naturally it is the yahapalana leaders who are largely responsible for berating the media but others such as that loquacious dentist who should let his patients open their mouths instead of his own, are not far behind.

There is a difference in tone and tenor in the condemnation of the media by the president and prime minister. Maithripala Sirisena tends to concentrate more on asking the media to report the truth and preaches on media responsibility. Ranil Wickremesinghe goes for the jugular naming newspapers and other media outlets and pointing his finger at individual journalists who seem to have disturbed his ‘serene’ politics and noxious policy initiatives he deems are the answer to all Lanka’s ills.

In that sense Wickremesinghe has a Trumpist approach to inconvenient realities. The US is one of the UNP’s favoured nations and the current US president’s thinking and outrageous conduct, especially with regard to the media, would normally be considered both infantile and abhorrent. But it would seem that the UNP leadership is determined to follow the Trumpist path to mendacity.

Whether Wickremesinghe has adopted the Trumpist style of verbal assault or Trump picked it up from this Miracle of Asia, hardly matters. Whichever came first there is a shallowness in it all and a lack of understanding of different genre of journalistic writing and reporting which makes their castigation unbelievably puerile.

Over the last three years Wickremesinghe has used parliament as well as other platforms to concentrate his fire on particular media outlets and journalists. The Wijeya newspaper group is one of them.  At various times and various occasions he has attacked the Lankadeepa, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Financial Times.

Two weeks ago Prime Minister Wickremesinghe turned his ire and fire on the political editor of this newspaper. It would take too much space and time to recall Wickremesinghe’s criticism of this newspaper, particularly the areas of contention and the Political Editor’s comeback. Broadly speaking however Wickremesinghe claims that while the government and by extension the UNP which is an integral part of the good governance government and the party of which he is leader, has done much good work in the field of economic and social development this is virtually ignored while the media relies on falsities.

In response to Wickremesinghe’s diatribe against the Sunday Times at a meeting the next day the Political Editor said that Wickremesinghe had just inaugurated a five-year National Export Strategy (NES). “When it takes full effect, it will no doubt be a boon to the national coffers, for there will be a steady influx of foreign exchange. The newspaper lists a number of projects launched by the Prime Minister including the 100 Day development programme and Vision 2020 which he declared would “propel Sri Lanka’s emergence into an era of prosperity for all citizens.”

Whether all these pledges would be achieved is debatable says the columnist. Then came the piece de resistance. Wickremesinghe had an audience in Singapore a few days earlier that Sri Lanka will become a “fully developed country in 2050” — in 32 years.”Since most of us will not be around when that great day dawns and hosannas are sung down Fifth Lane and UNP headquarters as Sri Lanka truly becomes the Miracle of Asia in another 32 years we will not see whether the predictions of this Oracle of Asia have come true, or as Mark Anthony said have been interred with their bones.

Let us, for the moment at least, forget about all those faithful pre-election promises made by Sirisena and Wickremesinghe about restoring the freedom of the press and how the media will have the freedom to criticize the yahapalana governance. Let us also for the moment look askance at the repeated promises to crush corruption and bring the perpetrators to justice, to create a meritocracy discarding nepotism and cronyism which of course has not happened.

Let us forget about judicial independence and integrity and the inability of the courts to find judges to hear the cases against Gotabaya Rajapaksa so that the cases are postponed from month to month with the public ignorant why so many judges have recused.
As one Sri Lankan lawyer here with a penchant for the lyrical told me “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind”.

So while the public is searching for the long promised accountability and transparency and being daily mesmerized by the shenanigans of the director boards of SriLankan Airlines and political interference even under the first yahapalana appointed board, the media bears the brunt of government castigations.

President Sirisena wants the media to report the truth. The media would if Sirisena does not shy away from telling it. At a Ven Sobitha Thera commemoration meeting he claimed that he did not know who drafted the 100-day programme and how Ranil Wickremesinghe came to be appointed PM with only 47 seats.

The answers to those questions, my friends, are also blowing in the wind. If Sirisena read his own manifesto for which he took full responsibility by signing off and making it public he would find the answers there. I dare say that the media, particularly the social media and several new websites run by untrained personnel and non-professionals do err, reporting unchecked stories and gossip.

But if all that is said about kith and kin, about family in high places in telecom bodies holding conferences in salubrious climes and in luxurious Nuwara Eliya hotels owned by family are all untrue there are means of recourse, especially if they appear in mainstream newspapers which provide the right of reply.

My grouse however is that those who attack the media mostly because they have failed to deliver are not competent to talk on subjects with which they have only a nodding acquaintance. President Sirisena claimed that he was once a provincial correspondent for Lake House publications. This hardly makes him knowledgeable on journalism. . Ranil Wickremesinghe’s family owned Lake House at one time but the SLFP/LSSP government took it over. But he never had first hand journalistic experience.

The point here is that there are different ways of reporting. There is the normal common or garden news reporting of incidents and events.
But writing on development issues calls for an entirely different approach. Reporting on development issues is a process not one of immediate coverage.

As a journalism training consultant for the Commonwealth Press Union in London I conducted several workshops in Kerala for south Indian and Sri Lankan journalists, in Colombo for Asian journalists and in the Solomon Islands for Pacific Region newsmen. The theme of the workshops was “development journalism”, a subject hardly known in the west but had been initiated and nurtured in Asia. The essential difference is that development projects have a long gestation period, their progress has to be followed over a long period of time until they reach fruition or simply die away as I have encountered sometimes. They cannot be evaluated in a day like covering a motor accident which is straightforward news reporting.

Development journalism is a much more arduous and painstaking job. It was for my regular writings in the Daily News on agriculture and other development issues and the use of mass media in promoting development that I was the first Sri Lankan journalist to receive the Jefferson Fellowship to the East –West Communications Institute at the University of Hawaii.

What we learnt there from experts in communications and sociology from MIT, Stanford University and other institutes of distinction served well in my later decades in journalism. Those who criticize the media without sufficient knowledge of what they are talking about could learn much from one of their colleagues in the cabinet- Sarath Amunugama who has years of experience behind him dealing with mass media and development, both locally and internationally.

Alas such opportunities are missed because our politicians are all-knowing pundits who prefer to hear their own voice.