Rajpal's Column

3rd May 1998

Press: relief from heaven's canteen

By Rajpal Abeynayake

Some parlour level behemoths of the Sri Lanka media world attempted to gorge it over the rest of the press at a media conference held last week at the BMICH. The inner machinations of the media world would be of interest to a few, but for the fact that the media has a far reaching impact on the community at large.

Setting the agenda for a free media therefore is well and good, so hats off to the media unions, the Editors Guild and the Publishers Society (those generally aloof birds) for getting together in a great and convivial spirit. But almost conveniently forgotten by hot- blooded writers and some (not all ) assorted Editors was the fact that the conference was titled "Free and responsible media''

Ha ha ha ha ha! Try talking about the word responsibility to some newspaper hacks and bleeding hearts, some of whom would qualify for receiving the international award for monumental hypocrisy, anytime anywhere anyplace.

Less said about that the better, but what's laughable are the fancy notions of omnipotence of some of the scribes. For them, being in the media is a license to kill – especially to kill reputations.

To hear them, one would feel that they had just descended after a tot of ambrosia at heaven's canteen, having been delegated the mission of cleansing the world by god himself. Nay, they think they are god. Nay, they are god.

One Editor, for instance, takes off by saying that there are scores of Criminal Defamation cases against him, and that these defamation cases were predicated "not due to gossip, but due to investigations of corruption launched by his newspaper."

Hurrump! Adayappa! Cleaning the Aegean stables with the sweep of a single hand. Note that preamble to his grandstanding tear-jerking heroic claim to fame. Says he that he is the hero, because his defamation cases were not just for writing gossip.

It means that those who were charged for writing gossip, kind of asked for it, but no, he the true and only worthy is your folk hero – because he was hauled up due to a moral crusade.

What's important is that its sad to see even representatives of Article 19 do not seem to know that there is a lot more to unmaking reputations that just calling names. For instance, the representative of Article 19 said something to the effect that defamation laws are relevant only when they concern personal character assassination, and not when investigations of corruption etc., are concerned.

How wrong this could be, because a false or a flimsy allegation of corruption (or rape) could unmake reputations just as well as namecalling or slander. Criminal defamation laws should be out of the statue books, because they are archaic, and they for good reasons have fallen into disuse.

But in polities such as ours where the absence of defamation laws could be taken as a license to kill reputations, there should be effective alternate methods of dealing with slander and libel, a fact made all the more difficult when certain publishers take cover under the fact they are too penurious to pay libel damages.

So, as far as criminal defamation is concerned, the focus should be on the alternatives to defamation in the statute books, in a journalistic value system in which some newspaper editors from the romantically kept press (as opposed to the government kept press) know zilch of the law, and think that there is no such thing that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty.

Goes without saying that this piece does not seek to throw the baby with the bathwater, to say that the conference amounted to nothing. It sought to forge consensus, and sought to keep journalistic independence alive. It sought to keep the flag flying in an imperfect world.

Of course, there has to be some relief coming from the direction of heaven's canteen.

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