Comments on: Looking Back at Six Decades of Lankan Journalism: What went wrong?

By: Arjuna Parakrama

Arjuna Parakrama — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 02:25:00 +0000

What went wrong with Lankan journalism? People like … who made a fine art of sycophancy, and resolutely refused to go beyond their (majoritarian) prejudices, hiding behind a fake bonhomie and uncritical nostalgia. Aided, of course, by the privileging of interviews such as this, which reinforce all that is mediocre and trivial about (English) print journalism in Sri Lanka.
The people of this country have gone through hell during the last three of the six decades referred to here, but neither the interviewer nor the interviewee finds this even relevant to an assessment of Lankan journalism. The point is that for (much of) the Sinhala South, all’s well now (“it was only terrorism, not legitimate grievance or institutionalised violence”), as long as our Army and the PTA (and the myriad other de facto oppressive regimes) are in place, we can forget about the past — or in this case, pretend nothing really happened. Lankan journalism was a major contributor to the war-mongering and carnage, and continues to be a bulwark of racism and prejudice, “with deepest consequence”.
Could we start (the assessment) again, please?

By: Sharanga Ratnayake

Sharanga Ratnayake — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 03:58:00 +0000

Great interview. But I think the spirit of 1960s (if there was such a thing) to learn new things is still there. It’s just not from those newspapers. I’ve grown up on television, and then on internet, and then internet coupled with iPhones and tablets. I’m addicted to high quality on demand sources of information such as podcasts, blogs and Wikipedia. I watch TV, but that too is only on the internet. I learn every day, just not from traditional local newspapers or from local TV stations.

Something really wrong with traditional local media outlets is that they are not on demand. They haven’t caught up with technology. Secondly, most of those journalists are on a Rajapkse payroll, or scared to death so they won’t write anything truly insightful. Third, there isn’t enough talent and brain in it. People who have the talent do other stuff. Just look at Groundviews. Most of the contributors aren’t professional journalists, but they write better articles than those that appear on Sinhala newspapers. It’s just ridiculous. One might think specialization leads to better quality and content. But instead all we get is badly written articles about superstitious nonsense about how powerful the maha hulawaliya is or something like that.

By: pearl thevanayagam

pearl thevanayagam — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 18:11:00 +0000

Edwin Ariyadasa is one of those rare journalists who practises the profession to its letters. His writings show no rancour or invective and his simple style of writing despite his enormous insight and experience in the field of journalism and other areas which he excels make us neophytes wonder what makes this gentle giant tick.
Ninety one and stil going strong.
May the Triple Gem bless him and may he be an inspiration to our journalist in these turbulent times.