Magnanimous Mahinda and the Foreign Media Mob

Some little man in a Colombo cafe started shouting abuse at me the other day. I don’t know him, and I don’t know why. That sort of thing is very rare here, but perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, given the current "you’re either with us or against us" climate. The vast majority of the Sri Lankan media outlets are now, voluntarily or not, marching to the beat of the government propaganda machine. Even the once incorrigible Sunday Leader now sports editorials that could almost have been written by the ministry of information and some columnists who write as though they’re applying for a job at the Media Centre for National Security. Any foreign media outlet that dares question the official version of how the war was won is immediately labelled as part of some sinister international conspiracy which, having first, for some reason, supported the LTTE, is now, for some reason, hell bent on sabotaging what is presented as the new united Sri Lanka. 

Perhaps the little angry man I met  in he cafe had just read the newspaper The Island’s feature article “Foreign Correspondent” (worth a read, that one), which ascertains that “The print media are the foot soldiers of the LTTE”, and goes a long way towards explaining how we are ultimately responsible for having prolonged the war so that we could continue to enjoy the comforts of being based in Sri Lanka. The same article appears on the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence’s website, so I suppose it must all be true.
 
Read the rest of this post on Morten’s blog.


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