Media freedom?
18th October 2015
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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