Mahinda effigy burning at Lasantha’s funeral. I thought this inappropriate
I hang around the Sunday Leader office. People from foreign news organizations drop by like it’s a pilgrimage site. I run into the BBC correspondent at Park Street, I hang out with some of the New York Times people when they’re in town. I enjoy having conversations with similar people, but in terms of covering a country I think it’s a bit off. A lot of international and local coverage tends to revolve around the same English speaking, NGO oriented crowd. However, the people you can talk to are not necessarily the people you should be talking to. If you’re talking professionally, that is, and not for fun. They could honestly get more relevant information from a random trishaw driver.
Not to sound bitter. These are my friends and generally where I hang out. I suppose one shouldn’t shit where they eat, but sometimes you just have to go.
The idea that we are representative rather than communicative is simply not true. It’s a circle jerk. The BBC interviews Sarvanamuttu. Sarvanamuttu’s CPA runs Groundviews. Groundviews publishes Kusal Perera. Kusal Perera writes to the Sunday Leader. The Leader interviews Sarvanamuttu. It continues, ad nauseum. It’s a closed loop. Then the western media comes in and talks to the same people. We read that and we talk about the same things. After a while you realize that the scene is constantly spinning and you kinda want to get off the ride.
I meet foreign journos when they visit and they often already have the stories written in their heads. The story for the past 30 years has been that Sri Lanka is fucked and it’s mostly the governments fault. Some people ask leading questions and act bored when they don’t get the answers they expect. Some of them actually hear stuff to the contrary and write the same story anyways. These are the best ones, many articles have zero sources in Sri Lanka at all.
That said, on a personal level many writers have experience in Africa or South East Asia or other places and understand the nuances here. The articles however, often come out the same. There is good journalism that comes out of here just as there is good advocacy work. The system, however, I think is bad. It is too much of a closed loop.
Add Money
I won’t say that the process is corrupted, but it’s certainly boring. A lot of people with degrees and English work for NGOs, plus they also lack the political connects to work in government where they’d probably like to be. Those NGOs are funded by foreign governments which emphasize certain things. Say, human rights and abstract media freedom. Those donors often don’t want to hear anything else, they have their budgets, they have their priorities, ground reality shows up way too late in the process.
If you’re a grant writing person following the money you’ll end up doing a certain kind of work and supporting a certain sort of perspective. The goal is to help, I do believe this, but the how has already been figured out in some Geneva board room. And it’s often wrong. Or irrelevant. But always expensive.
Groupthink
So, what happens is that foreign organizations pay a lot of people to promote certain things. It flies people out to conferences to reinforce those things. Then foreign media comes and asks those people what they think. Then the foreign organization reads the papers is like, ‘shit, Sri Lanka looks messed up’. Well, of course it does. That’s the assumption you started with. It’s a circle jerk.
So you agree that there is no such thing as an abstract media freedom.
I suppose there is. In the abstract. It’s not a bad general value
Lol…look at the dumbshits in the picture witha a big “no rage” sign but next to a burning effigy…
But the problem is sometimes people deify certain values as absolutes, without understanding the context within which those values can possibly exist. Media freedom cannot exists unless the media itself is honest & accountable. Almost all media, public & private, in this country have neither of those qualities.
So you agree that most of what is published in foreign media about our country is biased. And not the real ground situ. The NGOs don’t want the reality as that may run them out of business. People like saravanamuththu propogat what their donors want them them to say. And thier donors do not like MR’s government.
Good to see you posting about the reality. You are becoming honest. And building your credibility rather than sounding like the UNP lacky.
dammit, to be honest i think everyone is insane. Myself included
Correct me if I’m wrong. I doubt mahinda was actually responsible for Lasantha’s assassination, at least lasantha didn’t seem to think so. The two natural suspects in my opinion are either Gotabaya or SF
Manufactured dissent vs. Manufactured consent.
a la Chomsky.
hi Indi,
this is a case of epistemic closure–as conceived by Julian Sanchez writing at his own blog:
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/07/epistemic-closure-technology-and-the-end-of-distance/
on the left in America, this is generally characterized by ignorance of market economics and dependence on a limited number of heterodox economists to validate mistaken assumptions about economics. It seems that you in SL have epistemic closure on the left but not exactly in the form of ignorance about economics but rather power–they don’t understand that they don’t have any significant amounts of power nor do they know how to acquire more outside of appealing to organizations and governments who have no reason to exercise their powers to the end of making Mahinda do what these cloistered leftists want him to do.
so why do you continue to locate your social life in this closed circle? No quality choices? The framing effects of colombo 7 society?
That is the weirdest definition of epistemic closure i’ve every heard. Epistemic closure as far as I know is some thing like, if R—–>S and Q—->R then Q—->S. So i’m terribly confused as to what you mean. I don’t think there are alot of true liberals in the liberal camp here, they’re mostly liberals by sentiment. The only thing remotely liberal they’re promoting is the call for unadulterated media freedom, and condemnation of war and it’s inevitable consequences. The economic philosophy of their preferred political party resembles, proverbially speaking, the deformed child Milton Friedman would birth if he were repeatedly raped by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. These are the people who completely removed taxes of the wealthiest people and companies in the country the moment they came to power in 2002.
dodo,
i’m not talking about the technical philosophical term, “epistemic closure.” I’m talking about what Julian Sanchez wrote. Please read it. If you dispute the use, i would address that disputation to him directly.
I also addressed what i think the Indi’s set is stuck on–a misconception of power and outcomes–as I realize they are of money and probably have followed incentives to maintain and grow that money.
so why do you think Mr. Indi is stuck with them?
“t’s a circle jerk. The BBC interviews Sarvanamuttu. Sarvanamuttu’s CPA runs Groundviews. Groundviews publishes Kusal Perera. Kusal Perera writes to the Sunday Leader. The Leader interviews Sarvanamuttu.”
Why would this be? Is there no one else they can talk to? Or is that no one else understands the issues?
How does it work in other countries?
It doesn’t work too well in other countries as well. Fox does the tea-party thing, MSNBC does the liberatzzi thing. So most people are left with comedy central
Why do I hang out with certain people? Not based on their politics. I have friends from around the political spectrum. I am frequently wrong and I suppose they are too. No reason not to hang out
Its about the rewards.
In our Sri Lankan context, everyone with any foreign connections/ aspirations has extremely strong incentives to distort facts to fit a narrative. Why sell low when you can sell high to a more appealing market?
It just so happens that fake idealism is a very successful business model all over the globe.
No problem, the logician in me isn’t pedantic enough. I read the first couple of paragraphs and got the gist of what Sanchez is saying.
Indi does a good job of explaining why there is a liberal circle jerk going on in the media. As far as the consumers of the media is concerned. I think there are two issues IMHO. firstly there is some frustration at the state of economic affairs, what ever growth that has taken place in SL has happened largely in the rural areas and the urban upper middle class isn’t getting a proportionate cut. So there seems to be alot of complaining about the cost of living from these sectors. The richest people just want the UNP in power for various economic reasons. Secondly, like the overwhelming majority of humanity these people, despite their education, are stupid, they have no comprehension of rights, economics or war beyond the superficial sense. They just can’t think for themselves or aren’t properly equipped to think for themselves. These people in turn just latch on to the liberal media because it tells them to some degree what they want to hear and also because most of liberal media/NGO crowd also comprises of the upper middle class. Of course the problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the government media is quite possibly a bigger farce than the liberals, as well as there being no proper intelligent dissenting voice to the so called liberals.
Hmm… Indi is Jon Stewart?
Can you clone yourself Indi.
Hey leave me out, I am pretty good! :)
Hi Indi, why don’t you begin writing to some foreign media, Every paper, magazine and website has competitors. You might want to check. If I knew English I would. Or start countering at least some of those moronic articles these good people write, what ever their reason is
I wasn’t referring to the media itself, but the upper middle class that buys this stuff
Well, some folks in international-liberal-NGO circles do that sort of thing. Others do this sort of thing:
http://www.peacepolls.org/documents/peacepolls/001173.pdf
…which hardly reads like the sort of thing that’s been “decided in a Geneva board-room”, and which I think most sensible people would agree is interesting, helpful and worthwhile work. To dismiss an entire sector based on its worst exemplars is ridiculous and unworthy of you.
You know what pisses me off the most. I used to be able call myself a liberal with some dignity. now I’m wary of using that title.
“Or irrelevant.”
crux
Oh, just look at the pompous ass. PEDANTIC. The guy’s talking as if he’s Gödel or Aristotle.
Nothing changes the fact that Sri Lanka is fucked.
@ Nandala Rasiah.
On the American right, it is generally characterised by their inability to understand the fact that they are a bunch of stupid, gun-clinging rednecks with religion up their arses.
Not as fucked as your ugly little peanut brain.
Or you pee nut
@ zion… Or your pee nut
Article with similar theme, different country Thailand.
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2010/05/people-like-me-in-thailand.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BronteCapital+%28Bronte+Capital%29
The elephant in the room of course was not Thaksin – it was the views of the elite about him. It was a view tainted a little with racism or at least regionalism – with the Bangkok elite looking down on people from the provinces (especially those from Issan whose first language was sometimes Khmer but more often a dialect of Lao and who they would suggest had darker skin though I never noticed the skin tone
Try harder, turd.
so… what’s your point?
@zion.. No need to
Well, as if on cue, the Independent on Sunday – arguably the most liberal-oriented of the UK broadsheets – published this piece on Sri Lanka today.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/how-beijing-won-sri-lankas-civil-war-1980492.html
Here’s what it has to say about the LTTE:
‘[Prabhakan’s] challenge in 2002 was to convince the world that the man who had ordered the assassinations of both the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, was capable of re-inventing himself, Sinn Fein-style, as a civilian leader worthy of international respect. But it was a transformation that proved well beyond him: his reflexive response to any crisis remained the same – to murder the people he held responsible. The idea that a man of his kidney could run a plausible democratic state was one of the sicker jokes of the decadent period of US diplomatic hegemony.’
‘There was plenty wrong with the Sri Lankan polity in the years after independence, and there is plenty still wrong with it today. In the words of the then UN high commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, now president of the International Crisis Group, after her visit in October 2007, it is a country where “the weakness of the rule of law and prevalence of impunity are alarming”. But the idea that these wrongs could be righted by splitting this small island down the middle into two armed camps, and putting one of the halves in the pocket of a homicidal maniac, is one of the crazier ideas to have gained currency in our times.’
It’s not the first piece in the mainstream British press to take this line, and it won’t be the last. In liberalism, as in any other ideology, there are a whole range of shades of opinion on most issues, and the Sri Lankan ethnic problem isn’t an exception.
I think in our life time, we are going to see an energy war. World War 3. It’s just begun.
I wasn’t talking about liberals around the world. They’re fine for the most part, it’s the Sri Lankan type that is naive and philosophically inept.
So I guess it’s time to get married and produce babies, eh?
If you go at this rate sucking upto the GoSL, there’s no chance you will ever be killed in SL.
Heck, you may even be feliciated with an award for something.
while i’m sure that about 10% are receiving members only, rather than chapter-and-verse, in the caboose, I’d wager epistemic closure on the right is more about what is read, heard and seen rather than where and how they grew up.
@jcnars,
Looks like someone has the MIA Syndrome.