Malinga is wrong; Are you right, media?

It has often been seen in Advertising and Marketing, that he who shouts the loudest in media wins the consumer war, regardless of quality. It was Nazi propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels who pointed out how fickle the truth can be: “If a lie is repeated publicly a hundred times, it will become a truth.” Needless of debate, media possess an enormous degree of power. How media influences the public is not the path this article intends to tread; instead, it seeks to highlight the significance of media and its existence as the fourth pillar of Democracy.

During the Russian Revolution in 1919, Leon Trotsky identified the Media, like the defence forces, as one of the key public institutions to take over, if the revolution was to be successful.

How lies are converted to truths purely through repetition, how media is used to paint beautiful stories over shameful events of the island’s revolution and how powerful conglomerates with billion-rupee marketing budgets influence media to refrain from reporting their malpractices are all but evident – particularly to the eye that sees beyond the obvious footage or the coloured print, and to the ear that has the capacity to hear beyond the crafty voice-overs.

Nevertheless, the lack of ethics and the lack of backbones have led the present day media industry in Sri Lanka to become propaganda tools of the affluent. When the Cabinet spokesperson mocks every question that’s hurled at him, when the ministers steal cameras of journalists, when journalists are assassinated in broad day light, when female parliamentarians are abused within the chamber, when ministers’ sons run riot; where have you been, you backboneless media? Where have you been, those of you who choose instead to hurl insults at Lasith Malinga on Facebook?

Let’s take a walk on the other side: Yelling at journalists is by no means acceptable, and no one should be entertained to behave in the manner in which Malinga behaved outside Sri Lanka Cricket headquarters. Despite the fact that Malinga is an accomplished international sports figure and a role model to many, let us ask ourselves - is this really the most burning issue of the country?

Back to reality: We are on the verge of being thrashed before the international community at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Sri Lanka is being picked on by every international media institution for alleged war crimes. Hatred is being spread in the name of religion and the country is on the border of another ethnic war. We are cursed with a budget deficit larger that our GDP and the common man is starving thanks to the skyrocketing price of goods; but of course, we choose instead to pick on Lasith Malinga – the most immediate need of the hour.

Even water flows DOWNSTREAM… should one be surprised when the otherwise still and sleeping media and ‘Facebook macho men’ jump at a player who can never make a comeback on the media? A player who has significantly less power as opposed to a politician?

Priorities are not something we ever got right as a country or a society. Judging by how that vehicle of democracy, Media, is steering society, I doubt the change is near.

Good luck fellow citizens, keep believing in the mainstream media. 

- Sunesh Rodrigo

My mentor was killed!

He was not a mere journalist, but a visionary. Pen was his sword, a fighter belonging to a league of his own. Four years have lapsed, his words have come true; ‘Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me’.

I met him first when I was 12 during an Old boys meeting at St. Benedict’s College, Colombo when my father said, “Son, I want you to meet one of my favourite classmates. He is Lasantha Wickrematunge and he owns the pen that is feared the most in the country”. Dreamt of being a pilot, but over the next seven years I didn’t miss his column, he inspired me to take up journalism.

That fateful morning on the 8^th of January 2009, arguably the most courageous journalist the island has produced was murdered in cold blood, silencing not only him, but the entire profession. Disagree? Read and watch how appallingly newspapers and the electronic media are blowing the government’s trumpet, naked.

Four years ago at his funeral procession crowded by hundreds of thousands, the ferocious voices of the opposition parliamentarians, civil leaders and journalism activists swore upon Lasantha’s dead body to lay their lives to continue his fight and to fast to death until his murderers were brought to book. Opportunists! Today none of them could be bothered to wake up half an hour early and attend his memorial mass which only saw the participation of his close family, four parliamentarians, few staff members of The Sunday Leader, a handful of Benedictines and barely any journalists.

Entering through the gate to the Borella cemetery an empty, gloomy and morbid drive-way awaited us (My dad and I), instead of an expected gathering of thousands. We squinted in the morning sunlight as we looked out for Lasantha’s grave for there was no sign of a memorial mass of a great human being. A five hundred metre walk through the long rows of head-boards denoting the trenches where our dead are buried, got us to the destination where hardly fifty had gathered; the memorial service of a three wheel driver would have attracted a greater assembly.

The Chief Justice impeached, opposition scattered, Provincial Councillors assassinated by their own party members, glorious sons becoming astronauts and lawyers overnight, heart of the capital shut down to hold night races, central bank investing in Greece; at time when the country dearly misses his courage, when he should be remembered the most as every element of democracy is squashed by the power hungry, they’ve abandoned him. They’ve abandoned his fight, dream and vision living up to what Sri Lankans are known for, ‘A forgetting nation’.

My dad then explained the stark reality of life while at the quiet, windswept cemetery, ‘No matter how great, once gone, you are forgotten unless the living still could benefit from you’.

 -          - Sunesh Rodrigo