Groundviews exclusively carried Jayantha Dhanapala’s response to erroneous and selective media reports of his submission to LLRC a few days ago, in which he promised an authoritative transcript of his presentation and of the question and answer session from the LLRC.

A covering note to the media from Mr. Dhanapala and the transcripts were sent to us today. Download the transcript here as a PDF, and another PDF noting the members of the LLRC here.

Interestingly, Shamindra Ferdinando, the News Editor of the Island newspaper mentioned on two occasions that he and his newspaper stand by the initial story on Mr. Dhannapala’s submission to …

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[Editors note: We reproduce below two open letters sent to the Editors of the Daily Mirror and Daily Mirror online respectively. The letters flag significant concerns over a marked lack of professionalism and violation of established media ethics by both the online and print versions of the newspaper. The letters are published for any responses that either of the Editors wish to send to Groundviews, and for others to critically engage with in what we feel is a vital and necessary debate on mainstream media standards in post-war Sri Lanka. The author of the two letters blogs at http://electra.blogsome.com.]

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Letter to Editor of Daily Mirror

Dear Ms. Liyanaarachi,

As the Editor of the Daily Mirror, I wish to bring to your …

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Photo courtesy the Daily Mirror’s febrile imagination

On the 29th of July 2010 I read a strange and badly written editorial that appeared in the Daily Mirror newspaper. To put it mildly, the editorial was a diatribe against the so-called recent trend of ‘persuading’ citizens to become gay. It demonstrated an appalling lack of good judgment to believe that anyone can be persuaded to change his or her sexual orientation. What offended me most was the editor’s charge that there is a hidden agenda by certain groups and individuals to ‘rope in a few dozens of unsuspecting leading personalities in society to their clubs.’ It almost sounded like …

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The  recent announcement of Government of Sri Lanka’s (GOSL) intention to establish a Media Development Authority (MDA) in Sri Lanka could be taken as an indication of its approach towards media in the context of post-war economic development. An official  statement posted  on 25th July 2010 on a government news portal shows that the proposed authority will be modeled on along the lines of  the MDA of Singapore.

The sections dealing with the policy of MDA SL is almost copied word by word from the wikipage on the Singapore MDA, which in turn is based on the official Singapore MDA site.

Here are some examples:

“MDA will play a vital role as an umbrella organization for all kinds of media in …

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This letter was published in the Sunday Observer of 4 July 2010. In it Michael Meyler responds to Malinda Seneviratne’s recent articles in the Sunday Observer and the Lakbima.

Dear Sir,

I am writing in response to Malinda Seneviratne’s article “Language standards: whose version of our reality should we inhabit?” (Sunday Observer, 20 June 2010).

My own article, “A Snooty English Speaker’s reply”, was published on www.groundviews.org in response to Malinda Seneviratne’s article “Sri Lankan English: another snooty English speakers’ project?” (Sunday Oberver, 23 May 2010). My article subsequently appeared in the Sunday Observer of 6 June 2010. It was published without my consent, with a different heading, with numerous typographical errors, and with a key …

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NB: The following is a brief (and therefore rather incomplete) note on the censorship and state-control imposed on present-day Sri Lankan cinema, where filmmakers are forced to be conscious of the prevalent political discourse on artistic expression. Hiding behind a so-called (‘Victorian-inherited’) culture and blocking creative energy being an act of sheer hara-kiri on artistic expression, it is sincerely hoped that this note would lead to a more consistent dialogue among GV readers on artistic expression, especially in terms of Sri Lankan cinema.

It is deeply hoped that someone attached to the current regime in a policymaking capacity would come across what follows. If one takes a look at Sri Lankan video websites like col3neg and srilankantube largely meant for …

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Download the 162 page compilation of content as a PDF in high quality (25.4Mb), or low quality (3.7Mb). The low quality version is good enough to read, but the photos will look and print much better in the high quality version.

From 19 – 27 May 2010, Groundviews ran a special edition on the end of war in Sri Lanka. Over this week alone, the site received over forty thousand readers and exclusively featured over eighty thousand words of original content, one video premiere, over a dozen photos, generating over one hundred and fifty thousand words of commentary. Tens of thousands more have read …

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Many readers may have seen if not read about Defence Secretary Gothabhaya Rajapaksa’s interview with Stephen Sackur of the BBC HardTalk programme in which he calls Sarath Fonseka a liar and threatens to hang him for his position on a war crimes investigation. Local opinion, not surprisingly, given the current political context, has been divided on the propriety of Mr Rajapaksa’s outburst and the damage it could do to the image of the regime and of the country internationally.  There are the shocked and perturbed, albeit mostly in private, on the one hand and on the other, the hallelujah chorus of the apparatchiks. According to …

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Without peace, there is no development; without development there is no peace, President Rajapaksa has said. Yet, for the overwhelming majority of the population he presides over, life is quite harsh under the growing burden of the militarisation of the economy and society. Despite rhetoric on the devolution of power about 50,000 Tamils are still detained in camps behind barbed wire. Under such economic and political conditions hopes for reconciliation and the strengthening of civil society look bleak. To understand why this is so and its attendant solutions some understanding of the formation of post-independence Sri Lanka needs to be elucidated.

The mode of social development in Sri Lanka was a result of colonial superimposition of capitalism on a society where …

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The External Affairs Minister, Prof. G.L. Peiris, who has absolutely nothing to do with the judiciary, claimed at his first press briefing yesterday – 3 May – that President has DECIDED to pardon journalist J.S. Tissainayagam, who was ruled guilty by the HC of Colombo and sentenced to 20 years rigorous imprisonment.

The Minister for External Affairs, who was a Professor of Law, said the President has powers to do so and that it comes on a very important day for the media, the Press Freedom Day.

The Sri Lankan mainstream media, that plays into politicians without much ado, carried this news as if Tissainayagam was “set free”. Most reports sort of gave more weight to this statement …

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Renton de Alwis was one time Chairman for Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau. As noted on this website, he has over 35 years experience in marketing, communications and tourism related areas, having worked in an international environment covering over 30 countries.

In this interview we talk about the future of tourism in Sri Lanka. Renton comes out strongly in favour of the greening of Sri Lanka and eco-tourism in line with our traditions and culture. I asked him about the Akon incident, but he said he didn’t know enough to comment. After speaking at length about the environment, …

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Visit http://twitter.com/groundviews/sl-bloggers to read updates from Sri Lanka’s leading bloggers. Resident in the country as well as in the diaspora, these Twitter feeds feature updates ranging from the quirky and personal to the incisive and political.

This list complements our curated news sources on Twitter.

Visit http://twitter.com/groundviews/sl-news to access some of the best Twitter feeds on Sri Lanka, providing a range of news, analysis, situation updates, opinion and critical links.

The list already features feeds from independent and citizen media in English and Sinhala, mainstream print media, leading journalists, youth leaders, academe and election monitoring updates (as and when elections take place).

For a curated list of the best Twitter accounts by Sri Lankan bloggers, click here.

A news item on Lakbima News titled News websites caught red-handed doctoring video to make president look racist has this to say of Groundviews.

“Websites such as Groundviews exacerbated the situation by saying there was confusing reportage, not highlighting the obvious doctoring which was apparent to anybody listening to the video soundtrack and the clip. But this is Groundviews, a partial NGO website run by one Sajana Hattotuwa, under-qualified sub-standard ‘‘journalist’’ pretender, with a sub-standard ‘qualification’ from some obscure Indian university – which obviously did not equip him to be a man with any integrity to tell the truth.”

This is unsurprising reportage from Lakbima News, but the misleading and completely erroneous nature of this news item is evident upon even …

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The Akon rumpus, with all its nutty and freaky sides, did have one thing good about it. It raised the question, “what is media freedom ?” Except for “”Sirasa”” and its group channels, none of the mainstream media, ever bothered to investigate into this Akon show unplugging and expose the lumpen politics, that had a media institute mobbed and stoned once again, under this regime.

The mainstream print media over the past two or three days, reported on producing 16 men in Colombo magistrate courts by police and bailing them out, in relation to this mob attack. They carried excerpts of statements from all who condemned the Akon show and briefly noted the MBC/MTV Colombo office attack was condemned by some. …

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GROSS PLAGIARISM BY NIBRAS BAWA, AUTHOR OF THIS POST

A sharp reader alerted Groundviews that this article contains plagiarised content. Upon further inspection, we discovered that entire portions of the article have been copied verbatim from other web sources. This is a clear violation of site guidelines, and we sincerely apologise to the original content owners and producers over the inadvertent publication of their material herein.

An explanation by Nibras Bawa, the author, in response to an email sent by Groundviews as to how this occurred is published here, with a few sources named.

However, we strongly reject the point that …

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The 24th of February marked the first month anniversary of the disappearance of Prageeth Ekneligoda, the Lanka E-News journalist. Two special Police teams are said to be on the case.  They have however, not come up with any information as to Ekneligoda’s whereabouts.

Ekneligoda’s disappearance is yet another statistic of shame in the long list of disappearances, abductions and extra-judicial killings that have targeted the media in particular over the last four years.  His disappearance, it should be noted, took place in the course of a presidential election campaign the first post –war island-wide electoral contest in this country for two decades.  The war – the one that it between the GOSL and the LTTE is over and cannot be cited …

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Manik de Silva is the most senior and longest-serving Editor of an English newspaper in Sri Lanka. Presently the Editor of the Sunday Island, Manik was also a former Editor of the Daily News. In July 2009, he was elected as the President of the Editors Guild.

I interviewed him in July 2009, just around two months after the end of war. Our conversation touched on aspects of Manik’s life and how he took to journalism, how the media industry and practice of journalism have undergone dramatic change in recent years, the freedom of expression and threats to independent media.

Prof. Kumar David, an electrical engineer by training, regular columnist in traditional print media and a frequent commentator on Groundviews, talks about what’s left of leftist politics in Sri Lanka, the end of war and its impact on Tamil diaspora juxtaposed against th autocratic and essentially one-party rule in Sri Lanka.

I also asked him about the growing web and Internet censorship, which in a recent column he had referred to as a disturbing retrogression into a Lanka Internet Dark Age (LIDA).

Ameena Hussein is one of Sri Lanka’s best known English authors. She is also one half of the Perera Hussein Publishing House, that since 2003 has published some of the best new English writing in the country. The Moon in the Water, Ameena’s first novel, was long-listed for the first Man Asian Literary Award in 2009. Zillij, a collection of short stories I reviewed four years ago, won the State Literary Prize in 2003.

Our discussion touched on Ameena’s tryst with cancer and how this influenced her writing and outlook on life. We also talked about English literature in …

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