A Sri Lankan Journalist Eagerly Toes the Line
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
"In the end, you gravitate to a place where the management views are in consonance with yours," Rajpal Abeynayake said. "And I have gravitated to that place.”
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: October 18, 2013
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — HE calls himself the Rush Limbaugh of Sri Lanka, “except I’m not as obnoxious.” His critics say he should be hanged from a lamppost.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Dilrukshi Handunnetti, an editor at Ceylon Today, with a poster of Lasantha Wickrematunge, a journalist who was killed.
Rajpal Abeynayake, 50, is the editor in chief of The Daily News, the country’s largest English-language daily newspaper, which is wholly owned by the government. He is also the host of a morning radio program, and the two platforms make him the most influential English-language journalist in Sri Lanka.
His position atop Sri Lanka’s journalistic firmament has been assured in part because those who have criticized the government in recent years have been killed, intimidated or forced into exile.
Such a fate is difficult to imagine for Mr. Abeynayake, a gushing admirer of Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the defense minister. But leading a government news media organ can be a precarious job; his predecessor at The Daily News lasted only two years.
Mr. Abeynayake will soon pass his first anniversary as editor in chief, and he expects to have many more.
“I think, if I may say so, that they’re comfortable with me,” he said, referring to the governing Rajapaksa clan.
The Daily News is delivered free in Colombo’s high-end hotels, and its uncritical boosterism may surprise many of those coming to Sri Lanka next month as part of a meeting of Commonwealth heads of government. But Mr. Abeynayake is unapologetic about violating what many see as a basic norm of journalism: giving both sides of a story.
“We have a media that is far freer than that in the U.S., U.K. or the rest of the Western world,” he said in one of the many black-is-white statements he made in an hourlong interview. “Take the invasion of Iraq. Can you tell me whether the U.S. media was against it, including your newspaper?”
The reason Sri Lanka needs state-owned and state-dominated news media, he said, is that otherwise the government’s views would be ignored.
“A coterie of privately owned media could bring down the government by manipulating the news,” he said, “and that doesn’t do justice to those who elected them.”
Mr. Abeynayake cites Noam Chomsky and the government shutdown in the United States to defend Sri Lanka’s press restrictions. Many Web sites that are critical of the government are blocked in the country, and Al Jazeera’s recent coverage of elections in the country’s restive northern provinces was pulled from television channels.
“You cannot allow the freedom of the wild ass,” he said, referring to the animal. “And if media are manipulated to serve as the instrument of others’ agendas — like imperialists or multinational corporations — you need to counter that.”
NINETEEN journalists have been killed in Sri Lanka since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Among them was Lasantha Wickrematunge, the editor in chief of The Sunday Leader, who was beaten to death in 2009 by men on motorcycles who surrounded his car and forced him to stop. The police have no suspects in the case, which followed a series of other attacks.
Lal Wickrematunge, the editor’s brother, said in an interview that the Rajapaksa government was behind his brother’s death. The government has denied complicity.
Last month, Mandana Ismail Abeywickrema, a co-editor of The Sunday Leader, fled Sri Lanka after numerous death threats and a two-hour home invasion, during which the intruders carefully went through her files and held a knife to the throat of her 10-year-old daughter.
“The police keep saying it’s a robbery,” Ms. Abeywickrema said in a telephone interview, “but what robbers would go through my files and documents for more than two hours?”
Many journalists who continue to work in Sri Lanka say that a culture of intimidation prevents anyone from writing articles that are overly critical of the Rajapaksa family or the military.
“You really cannot question them,” said Dilrukshi Handunnetti, the senior deputy editor of Ceylon Today. “It’s just not allowed. You are expected to stay forever grateful that they delivered us from war.” Ms. Handunnetti described Sri Lankan journalism, including her own newspaper, as “a collective lame duck.”
Bob Dietz of the Committee to Protect Journalists said that attacks against journalists in Sri Lanka had declined in recent years, but that “the threat level is still remarkably high.”
“I think there was enough bad international publicity about the killings and assaults on individuals and media facilities that the preferred tactic has become intimidation,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment