Deepak said,

December 21, 2009 @ 12:07 am

congrates

Nalaka Gunawardene said,

December 21, 2009 @ 5:12 am

As a regular contributor and reader of Groundviews, I’d like to say: Congratulations to us all!

And to Sanjana, who bears most of the burden: Thanks for bringing us together and keeping it going!

Jude Fernando said,

December 21, 2009 @ 10:41 am

Congratulations. You earned this!

RD said,

December 21, 2009 @ 1:22 pm

Many congratulations, it’s a thoroughly deserved and well earned award and reward.

Jude ernndo said,

December 22, 2009 @ 6:13 am

Congradtulation. You earned this award. Keep up the goog work

Sohan Bones said,

December 23, 2009 @ 12:13 pm

Gasp! What!? How could they do that! It’s a conspiracy by these northern Asians to take over our fear (err, i mean fair) I-land! They must be funded by ………….. (errr, just fill in the blank with any nasty people and powers you can think of). And I bet they’re connected to all these nasty foreign powers who want to steal our oil and colonize us and………….. (fill in the blanks with whatever typical lame excuses that The Brothers and their goons and others keep hiding behind, whenever we’re given constructive criticism by the admittedly-sometimes-hypocritical foreign powers.)

I just wanted to say that in a sarcastic vein, before someone else says it with serious intent!

But getting onto a serious and genuine note: from me: congrats GV and Sanjana; it’s a very well deserved award. Especially as Som Patidar said: “at a time, when Sri Lanka needs it most”

SomewhatDisgusted said,

December 23, 2009 @ 6:26 pm

My congratulations to GV for fostering debate among people with wildly differing viewpoints. I have not seen any censorship of views and this is further evidenced by the diversity of opinion expressed here. Well done!

SomewhatDisgusted said,

December 25, 2009 @ 12:52 pm

Dear Jude,

“Are you using diversity of opinion in the GV as evidence of the absence of censorship?”

Yes. I agree that it’s not necessarily proof, but I think the consistent diversity of opinion is indicative of at least a lower incidence of censorship. It’s not isolated to one or two token concessions, as in the Colin Powell/Condi Rice example you took. In addition, I consider my own views on certain issues to be markedly divergent from the views expressed by the editors, but nevertheless I have not experienced censorship of any kind.

I can’t comment on the criteria for having an article published on GV and whether there’s a slant there as I’ve never tried to publish one, but I haven’t so far personally experienced any censorship of comment.

Has your experience been different?

Sampath Samarakoon said,

December 26, 2009 @ 11:40 am

Congratulations!

jfernando said,

December 28, 2009 @ 10:38 am

To somewhat disgusted

Thanks. No I haven’t experience any censorship because I haven’t written anything that would be censored. Actually I was referring to censorship by the state.

Perhaps, it would be fair to say that censorship is Sri Lanka is selective in terms of content, language, type of media, and timing. I think the government approach is very subtle and difficult to fit it into any clear pattern. But it does happen through formal and informal means. Even in the democracies that boast about freedom of press news get censored in many different ways that are difficult to pin down. Noam Chomsky has written plenty of articles regarding censorship in the US.

Then there is also self censorship that happen due to ideological, institutional and technological perspectives of the journalists, journalist and media companies.
Cheers
Jude