A MEDIA READER ON SRI LANKA

BY Vimal Tirimanna| IN Media Practice | 11/04/2002

A MEDIA READER ON SRI LANKA

The Sunday Times, Columbo
August 5, 2001

GOVT, EDITORS TO DRAFT CHARTER ON WAR REPORTING

The Government and The Editors Guild have agreed to formulate a charter that would provide a set of guidelines to govern future reporting of the on-going separatist insurgency in place of censorship on military related news.

This decision was taken on Wednesday at a meeting chaired by Defence Secretary Chandrananda deSilva and attended by a delegation of the Editors Guild, Media Ministry Secretary Janadasa Peiris, Information Director Ariya Rubesinghe, Additional Defence Secretary W.A.S. Perera and Military Spokesman Sarath Karunaratne.

The main aim of the charter is to define areas of national interest, military concerns and the public`s right to information. This will take into consideration military-media relations in theatres of conflict in other parts of the world, particularly in the backdrop of revolutionary changes in communications technology. These changes have made media censorship an obsolete practice which is no longer enforceable, states a news release by The Guild.

A three-member committee was appointed at this meeting at the Defence Ministry to draw up this charter. The committee which comprises the Director-General (Media) Presidential Secretariat, the Military spokesman and the President of The Guild is to base the charter on the set of guidelines on military-media relations already made available to the Government and the Military by The Guild.

The committee report on the charter is to be made available in the next two weeks. In July last year, ten members of The Editors Guild challenged the imposition of a censorship on military related news under Emergency Regulations in the Supreme Court. The Guild members argued that the operation of the censorship did not serve the national interest and was only suppressing the publication of military failures, fraudulent arms procurements and news which were generally an embarrassment to the Government.

The Supreme Court advised the Government to formulate some guidelines with the Editors Guild in reporting the northern insurgency.

The government in June withdrew the censorship.

The Island, Sunday edition
12 August, 2001

ARMY NEW WEBSITE POPULAR

Sri Lanka Army announced that its newly launched Website, within just eight
months of its inception, has fetched well over 600 surfers daily on average.
The figure fluctuates and is always on the increase.

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