A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, July 6, 2018
SAFMA condemns targeting of Lankan journalists
(Lanka
e News -05.July.2018, 11.30PM) The Sri Lanka chapter of the South Asian
Free Media Association is very concerned about the targeting by
politicians of two Sri Lankan journalists involved in internationally
reporting on Sri Lankan issues published recently in the New York Times
newspaper of the USA. We are concerned that, due to this individual
targeting, the professional sights of these journalists have been
violated. We are also concerned that the targeting is being done by
senior leaders of a political group that, when it was last in
governmental power, presided over a regime that saw the collective
intimidation and repression of the news media industry of by extreme
violence.
Singling out and publicly targeting individual professionals for the
work they perform for an employer, in this case, an internationally
published newspaper, is only valid if those individuals at least
appeared to have seriously violated the country’s laws in any manner. In
the case of the detailed news report published by the ‘New York Times’
newspaper of the USA, headlined ‘How China got Sri Lanka to cough up a port’
on June 25, 2018, the two Sri Lankan journalists concerned were the
local support reporters for the American journalist team belonging to
the ‘New York Times’.
As an organisation of socially concerned journalists, SAFMA-SL upholds
the right of anyone to respond to any news publication in terms of
public criticism of the published item or even its publisher. In terms
of the law as well as professional practice, both locally and
internationally, the responsibility for publication of any news product
is held by the publisher and not the employee professionals concerned.
Individual professionals are singly targeted for investigation only if
there is a violation of law by the publisher that is formally considered
by the authorities as serious enough to investigate and prosecute all
the personnel seen as complicit. In the case of the said news report, so
far, no legal authorities, either Sri Lankan or American, have thought
fit to raise issues of wrong-doing, certainly not of an urgent nature
that has immediate social repercussions.
The public naming of these two journalists last week remarkably echoed
that period of repression and the behaviour of politicians that heralded
such massive rights violations and violence. The fact that this
political criticism has sparked off a wave of similar or even worse
criticism of these two individual professionals via internet social
media is indicative of an attempt to intimidate Sri Lanka’s news
professional community as a whole.
SAFMA - Sri Lanka Chapter
107, Obeysekara Town
Rajagiriya
Sri Lanka
107, Obeysekara Town
Rajagiriya
Sri Lanka
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by (2018-07-05 21:53:11)
by (2018-07-05 21:53:11)