IDEALS

COLOMBO, (Aug. 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – These days, the front pages of
mainstream Sri Lankan newspapers are dominated by reports of
clashes between two Muslim groups, the drama of two baby elephants
separated from their mothers and government efforts to ban porn
sites and curb adult-only movies. This shift in news focus is a
radical departure from the days when newspapers were choked with
war coverage.

“I think the clashes between two Muslim factions have been
overplayed, maybe because there is no other news,” said Mohamed
Ameen, a veteran Sri Lanka journalist.

Since the end of a bloody Tamil rebel campaign for independence
for the country’s minority Tamils in May, Sri Lankan newspapers are
struggling to fill the void created by the sudden end to war news.

“What do we report now? That’s the question journalists are
asking,” said Ariyananda Dombagahawatte, Editor of the
Sinhala-language, Sunday Lankadeepa, the country’s largest selling
newspaper with more than 350,000 copies.

“Who thought the LTTE (rebels) would be defeated or who imagined
(Velupillai) Prabhakaran (the elusive rebel leader) would get
killed? No one was prepared for that, least of all we journalists,”
he added.

For some 25 years – during the course of the battle between
government troops and LTTE rebels – newspapers have been tailored
on a diet of war news which took a chunk of ‘Page 1′. Now
newspapermen are struggling for fresh story ideas and new ways of
attracting readers whose daily dose of war news is more or less off
the pages.

The issue confronts more the vernacular media that the English
language-press because Sinhala newspapers have a far wider reach
in the country where the majority speak Sinhalese and have been
supporting the military crackdown against the rebels. Thousands
have died in the conflict since 1983.

Victor Ivan, Editor of the mainstream ‘Ravaya’, a Sinhala language
newspaper, says journalists are confronted with a major challenge
and believes the debate and discussion would now shift from the war
to others issues like reform of the state, education, refugees,
ethnic emotions, transport, parliament, election systems, the
judiciary, and the sort.

“But in this new focus, the challenge means journalists have to
read up more and be able to understand and analyse topics which are
more complex unlike before when news was just a phone call away,”
he said.

Most reporters call their military contacts or media spokespersons
in the military for stories which were mostly straightforward
reporting of events or clashes, a problem one publisher said led
to a drop in good investigative reporting.

“That is one of the problems we’ll have – how to handle proper
investigative reporting on corruption and other issues of public
importance. Reporters in the past two decades were content with
calling their contacts to reporting war and other related news,”
the publisher who owns a stable of newspapers and magazines in
Sinhala and English said. He requested anonymity.

Newspaper reports on the war have varied over the years from high
spurts during heavy battles in the war-front to low intensity
particularly during peace talks between the government and the
rebels. Sri Lanka’s development, social and economic-news media
changed sharply after July 1983 when minority Tamils were attacked,
many killed and their properties destroyed by rampaging mobs from
the majority Sinhalese community in the worst bout of ethnic
unrest.

Even though the economy hasn’t grown to its full potential due to
the unrest and world opinion, the thirst for war news has led to
a plethora of newspapers, radio and television stations against a
handful in the early 1980s.

Editors from the English language press however say war news has
not been their main priority. Sinha Ratnatunga, Editor of the
Sunday Times, Sri Lanka’s largest-selling independent English
weekly, says there was a lot of interest in the war particularly
during a period of fighting or a major incident and especially
during the final military onslaught (earlier this year).

“But over the years we also balanced war related news with a lot
of political news and other developments. War news was not exactly
our staple diet,” he said, referring to his newspaper.

He said with lots of elections due in the next few months,
presidential and parliamentary polls included, reader interest will
shift back to the politicians and that’s what newspapers will be
focusing on at least in the months ahead.

Defence correspondents, journalists who write weekly newspapers
columns on military and war-related affairs, still focus on
military matters but its more about how the war was won, new
appointments and changes in the military hierarchy.

Sunday Lankadeepa editor Dombagahawatte says the news content
cannot change overnight. “We need to keep running stuff on how the
war was won for at least a few months and quietly shift gear. You
can’t do it immediately because this (thirst for war news) is what
we created over the years. Trying to stop it now would be like
suddenly stopping a man drinking water.” He said he noticed a
slight drop in the circulation of Sinhala language newspapers after
the war ended in May for these reasons.

Chaturanga Perera, a Colombo business executive and vociferous
reader of both English and Sinhala newspapers, says war and
business news is normally what gets his attention. “Yes, there is
a kind of vacuum created by the sudden drop in war news but I
believe since we have been reading newspapers all our life, we will
move with the changes in news content,” he said.

Another veteran journalist, Siri Ranasinghe, Editor of the largest
circulating Sinhala-language daily ‘Lankadeepa’, the sister paper
of the Sunday Lankadeepa, says the vacuum created by no war news
means newspapers have to look at new stories and what to report.
“While normal crime news will be our focus, development news would
get more play in newspapers now,” he added.

Indeed this Sunday’s newspapers were filled with clashes between
Muslim groups in Beruwela, south of Colombo and other developments.
Next week’s polls in the north have also got a lot of play. There
was only, just a few paragraphs about the discovery of a huge cache
of weapons left behind by fleeing rebels.