These men are not messiahs, but they’re noble nonetheless
This comes out of the comments on the last post, Case For A Free Press. There seems to be a broad perception that publications need to be objective in order to deserve freedom. This is, by any Constitutional reading, simply incorrect. Freedom of speech is a right of private citizens (and, by extension, companies). It is not something reserved for God to periodically reveal his objective wisdom but for fallible and biased humans to publish their views into a marketplace. Out of that marketplace you get something akin to the truth, but that’s an emergent property – flowers out of dung. No single publication will ever contain the ‘truth’. Truth in that sense simply doesn’t exist when you’re talking about human opinion and analysis. The point of a free press is that you allow everything except major libel, obscenity and slander go and give readers the freedom to decide. Freedom looks like a damned ugly mess sometimes but – since God is usually unavailable for comment – it’s the best we can do.
Here’s the comment I made:
I think y’all are misunderstanding a free press. The relevant section of the Consitution reads
(1) Every citizen is entitled to –
(a) the freedom of speech and expression including publication
Wijeya, the Leader, the Island, etc are private companies with private owners and accompanying biases. They are well within their rights to publish stuff with a bias, though a newspaper needs to maintain objectivity for broader market reasons. Private companies and citizens don’t have to comply with some vague concept of objectivity in order to publish, and they certainly should be able to do so without random yakkos dragging them out of their cars and beating them on the streets. It is totally OK for a publication to have political biases, and they don’t need the ‘respect’ of any government to get basic civilian protection from that government.
I repeat, freedom of the press exists regardless of the ‘quality’ or bias of said publications. Freedom is funny like that.
In Sri Lanka it’s pretty strikingly obvious that all the papers and electronic media are biased. Wijeya, the Leader and Sirasa are more ‘opposition/UNP’. The Island is a bit JVP, etc. People are wrong in that none of them are LTTE, that accusation is just fear-mongering hyperbole. They are right, however, in that the media has biases.
However, they are certainly wrong in saying that this is a necessarily bad thing. They are damned wrong to assert that this somehow justifies the detention, abduction and murder of journalists. A free press is just that, free. If Mr. Wijewardena wants to write hagiographies of his extended family that’s actually OK. He won’t because he’ll sell less papers if the thing is a totally biased rag. However, he is well within his Constitutional rights to do so. See, the fun thing about the free press is that there is no nanny role, saying what’s right and what’s wrong. A bunch of stuff gets published, and people get to read and buy as they please. Objectivity gives a paper a broad readership, but that decision is made by the people, not conferred from on high. We decide if we feel like buying a newspaper, or if we’ll leave it on the stands cause it’s propaganda. As citizens we also have the right to publish our own stuff if the market is totally bereft.
The beauty is that if you give up central control and authority over truth you actually get more of it. The government newspapers – which ostensibly serve the public – are just total propaganda which people only pick up for the classifieds. That’s what happens when you trust someone else with ‘the truth’. The only way to really have truth is to let it go and let the citizens and markets of this nation sort it out. Truth is not some magical thing given to you by anyone else. We all have to work hard at it as readers and writers, expressing whatever we feel – biases and all. Any objectivity is actually a meta property that emerging out of vibrant and diverse free press – it is not contained in any one publication. If you want absolute truth you’d be better off putting your faith in holy books. If you want reality you actually need to do some writing, reading and thinking yourself. Under our Constitution we have this freedom, as messy as it may be. God protect the journalists trying to exercise it, and spare them our misplaced scorn.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/prcs47.php
I don’t believe that ‘freedom of speech’ is the issue here. If a media person can be plied with food, drink and a typed media release is given to them at the end of the evening, this release will be on media next day verbatim. 99% of the time in the case of Sri Lanka.
You as an educated young man from the west has the intelligence to grasp what is true or not. The masses sometimes simply believe. So for media to practice ‘freedom of speech’ at the expense of the general public – I say no!
And as part of the intelligentsia in Sri Lanka, I sincerely hope you do too.
I don’t in anyway condone the beating and harassment of media persons. But I will cry out publicly if they are no better than the government and they too set out to deliberately mislead the public.
So as far as I am concerned, all media people in Sri Lanka have lost any sort of credibility they may declare to posses. And you know very well a prejudiced media even in the ‘free west’ is not and will not be tolerated. Especially when it comes to national security.
Nationally I believe our media could stand up against the present irregularities by the government and the LTTE atrocities and gather global support. They are that powerful. But they don’t. Not because they can’t, they just can’t be bothered.
But that is part of the responsibility that comes with a job of that nature.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/prcs47.php
Reporting bias also can give you some idea of what the other party is thinking on issues. I buy the Daily mirror/Nation for general news, Island to understand the Sinhala nationalist viewpoint, Tamil dailies for the Tamil viewpoint on current events and Daily news for the obituaries section. Take the war for example, both Tamils and Sinhalese have totally opposing views on this which is largely fed to them by their media and information available to them.
Press freedom, like most other liberties, comes under pressure during times of conflict. Even a cursory examination of history (and indeed the present) reveal that this is so, even in the most mature and advanced of democracies.
I do greatly admire the courage of some of our journalists, if not always their level of professionalism or ethics. I think this country will, in time, come to realize their heroism. But while there’s a war going on, people will always put security and survival before liberty, regardless of what Ben Franklin may have said.
I am sometimes amazed at rights and freedoms we still have in Sri Lanka. Very few people I talk to seem to have any kind of passion for these things, while a great many seem to yearn for some kind of dictatorship.
There are precious few rights left in SL The emergency regulations give such sweeping powers that they negate most of what is enshrined in the constitution.
As long as the state decides not to use their powers on you, you may assume that you have rights. A number of articles written by bloggers over the last year or two testify to experiences (just do a search there were plenty of examples) that send a shudder through ones systems.
They were unlucky, although completely innocent. We have been lucky-so far.
One does not want to rely on the luck of the draw to remain out of prison and alive.