Editorial

5th September 1999

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Mangala media mafia?

Though it is grating usually for the media to editorialise about itself, with the Media Minister continuing his attacks on media institutions, newspapermen unwittingly find themselves being catapulted into the public spotlight.

Usually , an incumbent government identifies the Opposition party as enemy number one when elections approach. But, the Media Minister seems to have decided that the opposition includes others, such as Editors and journalists including those who have no truck with opposition politics.

It is not surprising in one sense. The media has only been caught by the government doing its job. That’s an accolade for media persons, and the Media Minister’s campaign to hound the press can be seen in one way by the journalistic community as a back-handed compliment of sorts. The media has also got further confirmation that it is doing a good job these days, but we are not exactly patting ourselves on the back. The confirmation came from a respectable non- partisan quarter, in the form of a statement made by Senior Counsel H L de Silva, who in an address to the Bar Association said that he is embarrassed to hear about “misdeeds in the judicial service from the media, and not from the Bar….’’

To lapse into the colloquial, it is a job, and somebody has got to do it. If it has to be the media, and not the opposition or the legal community that censures accountability in public institutions, that’s a role that the media will have to play with charity to all and malice towards none, as much as circumstances permit.

Sometimes though, even the public can see the media as being overreaching its brief, especially when the media is seen as an intruder in the private realm for instance.

This problem has been more pronounced in Western societies, where celebrities have been notoriously seen to have bitter-sweet relations with the press as the experience of the late Princess Diana proved.

But, in sum , it’s not as if the press is unused to its role of being seen as part villain and part hero; the image is an occupational hazard that seems to attach to the profession.

So, it’s commonplace for the media to see governments and private citizens attempting to grapple with the double - edged quality of the fourth estate in relation to civil society. Mediamen were acquainted recently of the efforts in Britain, for instance, to regulate the press by a self - cleansing system that was put in place by Editors, journalists and pro - active citizens .

The Sri Lankan media including publishers and journalists seemed to have arrived at a consensus that the media in Sri Lanka would benefit by some similar regulatory system , which is an acknowledgement that the media doesn’t consider itself infallible or lily - white.. Sounding like the Pope sometimes is an occupational hazard that columnists may face, but in the final analysis, most journalists have no illusions about the fact that the media has to evolve, and that mechanisms have to be put in place to ensure that the power of the media is not untrammelled.

These are realities that the media world can live with. But what the media is at the receiving end these days, is something in the form of a frontal attack. The Media Minister is not talking in the refined language of “self- regulatory mechanisms’’ or press commissions. Instead he is on a street- brawl mode. Compare that to the self effacing stand of the local media, as pointed out earlier in the editorial, and the reader can judge who seems to be closer to the Mafia in general disposition — the Media Minister, or the gentlemen of the press?

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