Its easy to confuse who is and isn’t an MP in Sri Lankan politics since practically every member of the ruling coalition government is a minister of something.

Its a payoff of sorts and will be a part of SL politics as long as there are Singhalese politicians.

In fairness, I would suspect the salary cost of maintaining the bloated cabinet is infinitesimally small compared to allocated money squandered through their ministries.

Turning to the main topic of discussion, it is a HUGE stretch to call the coverage of the ethnic conflict in SL by most international news agencies, journalism.

What they are are reporters. Here I am talking about people like Peter Apps, Krishna Francis, Ravi Neesman, Amal Jayasinghe, Paul Tighe, PK Balachandran, N Ram et al.

Their reporting consists primarily of logging on the MOD website and then regurgitating what the Singhalese government has to say. If there is time before filing the report , they might place a call to Irashiah Illanthayrian for comment to appear balanced.

As we all know, a significant percentage of the articles are simply cut and paste.

IMO, the majority of Sri Lankans do not want to hear the truth. It would tear their lives apart and bring into question their entire belief system and culture.

Last night when I wrote that post, I was probably responding to the fact that Reuters had not told the full picture. I will honestly say that I got muddled with the fact that the ‘M’ is MPs could have stood for ‘members’ or ‘ministers’. The article was focusing on Ministers and not Members. My apologies for being careless.

However, I think the comments my problematic post attracted raises some interesting questions. Most of the comments were quite reactionary. It would have been interesting to explore such issues as why MPs (ie. members of parliament) are not considered leaders. Also, it would have been interesting to ask if Reuters has a responsibility to mention that there were two Members of Parliament who met with similar fates…

And the story could have had bigger impact: Four Parliamentarians Killed in Four Months! But of course, I now know that Reuters aren’t in to sensationalising stories. So, apologies to them for even considering they may have been.

Someone mentioned ‘hard news’. I really don’t know what hard news is. Is it news that makes the journalist hard, or the audience hard? I hope I don’t get accused of using gendered language! Maybe its news that’s hard to get. But I seriously don’t know what hard news is. Of course, wikipedia will probably define it – but I still don’t know what it means. Perhaps it just means big news. Or edgy news. Or news that’s going to have a hard impact on the audience as well as the journalist.

The Reuters report tries to bring out that in this war, the leadership of the government is getting killed. Two of them since January. The implication is that the government is losing the war.

On the wider issues, yes for sure, it would be great to delve in more depth… with you on that…… but then again, this is hard news… perhaps a feature could explore more.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, my point wasn’t about that – it was about the greater issue about the lack of detailed analysis about Sri Lanka.

Good to know you are keeping watch Indi.

so in fact reuters got the main detail that the blog post cite as instance of “sloppy journalism” right here. that there is sloppy journalism is a fact but not here. here it is a case of sloppy blog poster undermining his own argument by making mistakes.

calm down and think clearly before writing

errr… ministers and mps are two different things. but then again details like that are not valid by the standards of this blog i suppose.

anyway i agree that reuters and other agencies( reuters in particular) coverage is sloppy (and biased towards terrorists. may be you may not agree to that ) when it comes sri lanka coverage. i have written about that in detail (with evidence) before elsewhere.

journalists should have only two valid motives .
1. be objective
2. cater to their market ( such a commercial motive is not a “bad” thing btw as some socialists think )

foreign news agencies have generally failed on the first score. but going “down and dirty”, whatever that means, is not the answer ( esp if that means expressing subjective opinions and taking sides ), adhering to objective journalistic standards will be. for instance they should check for substantiated facts before reporting and and not indulge repeatedly is such racist mistakes as equating ltte terrorists with tamils.

that agencies are neglectful of sri lanka and post third rate reporters here is due to to the second motive. it is the same motive that led international media to almost completely neglect the plight of sri lankan migrants in lebanon ( largest group by far of expatriates in that country ) when israel invaded in 2006 while giving acres of news coverage to scores ( as opposed to thousands) of western expatriates there. and that is reality.

Are you suggesting that Maheshawaran and Siwaneshan were ministers too?

I may sound stupid stating the obvious… but There’s a real difference between a minister and a parliamentarian.

Arnt you just mad that there’s coverage for a pro-govt. MP who got killed by the LTTE?

if you want to find what happens here( or anywhere for that matter ) you have to examine each report in detail. ask questions like what are the sources are they substantiated ? what can motivate the cited sources? what motivated the reporters to report without sources ? was all sides given equitable space to put their case? if not why?what kind of words are used and what does they say about the reporters bias ? what does other reports on the same news say ? why the difference if any ? and what does history of this particular reporter’s reports indicate? answers to these questions can be found by anyone who has the will to search .

for those who do not bother they get the news they deserve ; rumors and propaganda ( even through ppl who call themselves journalists and work for supposedly reputed media groups )

Two murdered Tamil MPs are not counted!!!