දූෂණය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Answering replies from Shiral Lakthilaka in Ravaya and Wasantha Wijenayake in Lanka, Ivan denies ever certifying the Rajapaksa administration as clean. His argument was that J.R. Jayewardene’s political system was built to reward plunder, so every ruling party since 1977 has been corrupt by design — and the opposition attacks corruption only to reclaim the right to profit from it. He rejects the claim that corruption cannot be proved without rumour, citing Ravaya’s own documented exposures under previous governments. He then turns to the libel suit Gotabaya Rajapaksa brought against Lasantha Wickrematunge over the MiG procurement story, and states that Wickrematunge’s celebrated posthumous editorial was written after his death by another hand.
යන්නේ කොයිබටද?
The first presidential election after the defeat of Prabhakaran’s de facto state ought to be about what kind of Sri Lanka replaces it, but the campaign has been consumed by trivia and mutual spite. Both main candidates are products of the war they won — Rajapaksa as commander-in-chief, Fonseka as army commander — and neither has said what he would build. Rajapaksa promises a good future without describing it; Fonseka would abolish the executive presidency without saying what succeeds it. Both are asked to address the grievance minorities believe survives Prabhakaran’s defeat, and to explain how corruption can be beaten within a system built to protect it. The press is told to stop staging cockfights.
ජනමාධ්ය මර්දනය
Six media organisations held a meeting against the revival of the Press Council at which the main speakers were not journalists but Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mangala Samaraweera. Ivan reads it as a party turning a media platform into its own, and argues that repression is native to this political system but is sharpened by the media’s own misjudgements — including, during the war, forgetting that the power to decide questions of war and peace rests with an elected government.
අදහස් පළකිරීමේ නිදහසට තහංචි නොපැනවිය යුතුය
With the war over, Ivan argues, every restriction placed on expression directly or indirectly should go — including the freedom to criticise the government, which a government put in place by the people must hear. On the Press Council revival he finds neither option good, and points to India, where the regulator is built from the media organisations and Parliament together.
සරල දේශපාලනයෙන් ඔබ්බට සිතීම
Every outlet but one spoke with a single voice over the Malabe abduction, and Ivan credits that with the arrests that followed. He turns to a pattern in the reporting of the suicide attacks — on Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, on the president, on Sarath Fonseka — in which the bomber was brought to the place by someone inside, and asks whether the parties can think past defeating each other.
ගවේෂණාත්මක වාර්තාකරණය
Reviewing the first award for investigative journalism at the editors’ excellence ceremony, Ivan sets the winning work — a case that the Accelerated Mahaweli Programme destroyed the Rajarata tank ecology and caused the kidney disease there — against what investigative reporting is defined to be, and argues the ecology had broken down before the Mahaweli reached it. He asks to be corrected if he is wrong.
පුවත්පත් මණ්ඩල ක්රමය නැවත ඇති කිරීම
The Press Council was left dormant in 2002 so that the industry could regulate itself, and is now being revived. Ivan sets out what is wrong with the law — registration of every owner and editor, renewable yearly — and what is wrong with the self-regulation that replaced it, and concludes that the media organisations’ only course is to negotiate a single institution in which the government also has a share.
පෝද්දල ජයන්තට පහරදීම
After a television programme used footage of Poddala Jayantha and Sunanda Deshapriya while
alleging that some journalists were paid by the LTTE, Poddala came to Ivan and asked him to
intervene. Ivan describes what he did, what the president said when the question was put to
him, and why he thinks naming such journalists would have been ruinous — and argues that the
fault can only be corrected by looking critically back at the policy that produced it.
මහජනයාගේ පරමාධිපත්ය බලය සමග සෙල්ලම් කිරීම
The elections commissioner has asked voters not to vote for candidates accused of thuggery
and corruption, and Ivan asks how they are supposed to know who those are. India requires
every nomination to carry a sworn statement of assets and of cases pending; Sri Lanka has an
assets law that is not enforced and no ceiling at all on spending, while some Western
Province candidates have spent three or four hundred million rupees.
කර්තෘ සංසදයේ ආචාර ධර්ම හා පුවත්පත් පැමිණිලි කොමිසම
Reading Ian Beales’s review in the Press Complaints Commission’s 2007 annual report, Ivan
sets out a verdict the industry has not answered: four years on, self-regulation stands
still, complaints are few and weak, the newspapers themselves are divided over whether they
want it, and the Editors’ Guild has let its own code go unreviewed. If neither the public it
protects nor the industry that made it believes in it, Beales asks, what future can it have?