@PresRajapaksa draws snark, concern, and criticism
Here is a quick pointer to one of Sri Lanka’s few remaining independent media sources, Groundviews, which just posted a lengthy look at the president’s newfound interest in social media: “The Sri Lankan President’s Twitter archive and Propaganda 2.0: New challenges for online dissent.” In a country where there isn’t all that much to laugh…
Sri Lanka’s Black January: Year two
Black January commemorations in Colombo have become an annual event. Tuesday’s demonstration was the second. The protest aims to recall the series of killings and attacks on journalists in Sri Lanka in recent years, many of them occurring in Januaries past. All of them have gone untried and unpunished, sustaining the country’s perfect record of…
In Sri Lanka, justice for Eknelygoda is a waiting game
Three years ago, on January 24, 2010, columnist and cartoonist Prageeth Eknelygoda vanished on his way to work to cover the final campaigning in Sri Lanka’s bitterly contested presidential election. He has not been heard from since. The pro-opposition website he worked for, Lanka eNews, has been repeatedly attacked, its offices hit with arson, its staff…
Reuters Institute focuses on Sri Lankan journalism
The most recent paper produced by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, “Media Freedom in post-war Sri Lanka and its impact on the reconciliation process<,” does a great job of cataloging the abuse Sri Lankan journalists continue to face after the decades-long civil conflict with Tamil secessionists ended in May 2009.
Journalists still murdered where impunity reigns
Almost half of the 67 journalists killed worldwide in 2012 were targeted and murdered for their work, research by the Committee to Protect Journalists shows. The vast majority covered politics. Many also reported on war, human rights, and crime. In almost half of these cases, political groups are the suspected source of fire. There has…
Integrity vs. authenticity in video journalism
Back in November 2010, Britain’s Channel 4 broadcast a leaked video that appears to show men in Sri Lankan military uniforms executing bound prisoners, the camera panning across a series of bodies laid out in a ditch. Family and friends identified one of those bodies as that of Tamil Tiger TV newscaster Shoba, also known…
UPDATED: A window of opportunity to take on Sri Lanka
If you’ve been watching the attempts to silence media in Sri Lanka through attacks, disappearances, legal harassment, and government policies aimed at restricting free speech and the right to information, take the time to speak out with others around the world today. An opportunity like this only comes around every four years.
Sandhya Eknelygoda speaks for Sri Lanka’s disappeared
When I first met Sandhya Eknelygoda in May 2010 in her home outside Colombo, she was a distressed mother of two young boys whose husband had gone missing. He was last seen four months earlier, just prior to the elections that returned President Mahinda Rajapaksa to power after the end of the decades-long war with…
No right to information in Sri Lanka
You would think that with fighting between government forces and secessionist Tamils finished in May 2009, the Sri Lankan government might ease its grip on public information–information which is really the property of the country’s citizens, not whichever administration happens to be holding political power. In 2004, former President Chandrika Bandaranaike’s cabinet did approve a…
Defense tools for Sri Lanka’s online onslaught
Sanjana Hattotuwa, the founder of the citizen journalism website Groundviews, sent us the links to a new series of posters and videos focused on digital communications security. The material, which is aimed at a Sri Lankan audience, is available in English, Sinhala, and Tamil, but is relevant to anyone who uses the Internet or a…