SERVILE AND/OR HOSTILE

A respected member of the Sri Lankan Parliament, known for his professional and intellectual attributes and widely regarded as a moderate, recently told a journalist in private conversation that the tragedy of the Sri Lankan press today was that it was either utterly servile or totally hostile to the ruling People's Alliance (PA) government of President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.

Most observers will agree with this view. The PA, like governments anywhere, is only too willing to accept the sycophantic syrup poured out by the government-controlled press. Neither have the rulers shied from using the levers of power to ensure a good press for themselves, often confusing the national interest with their own political interest. So much for the servile press. At the other extreme is the hostile press which is savagely critical of the president and the government and sometimes descends below the bounds of decency in its personal attacks.

In such a climate, Ms Kumaratunga has been getting increasingly impatient with those newspapers she sees as opposed both to herself and the PA. Her impatience slowly turned into rage climaxing recently with a threat to close down some newspapers, allegedly on military advice. Predictably, this raised a howl of protest locally and also earned the president some bad press abroad. Those who remonstrated included the Free Media Movement (FMM), whose leaders had been strong supporters of the PA in the 1994 election campaign.

Said FMM: "The president's warning is no more than a thinly veiled threat aimed at stifling and gagging the free press, bullying media personnel and thereby wilfully obstructing the people's right to know."

This was hard stuff, indeed, coming from a group which made no secret of its antipathy to the previous United National Party (UNP) governments which ruled for 17 years, and had reposed its faith in the new media order promised by Ms Kumaratunga. That new dispensation has been slow in coming, and the government press, together with state-owned television and radio, continues to trumpet the government's virtues and the venality of its predecessor.

But it must be said in fairness that the media situation, though by no means good, is not as bad as it once was. The FMM statement, for example, was published by at least one government-controlled newspaper. Despite the threats, there have as yet been no newspaper closures. But a clutch of criminal defamation cases have been filed against the editors of several national newspapers, one for the seemingly trivial offense of saying that the president attended a late-night party of one of her PA MPs at a Colombo five-star hotel. That report turned out to be wrong or, as the president's supporters would have it, "false". But was it criminally defamatory? The Colombo High Court is now in the process of deciding.

The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa continues to be the fall guy, in the minds of today's rulers, for everything that went (and goes) wrong in the country although his methods do not seem to be anathema to his successors. For example, Mr Premadasa was roundly condemned for using the instrument of criminal defamation for bullying the media, a tactic which the PA too has now picked up.

Ms Kumaratunga's instincts are basically liberal and it is unlikely that she would resort to closing newspapers although such threats may be made in anger. But it must be remembered that it was the government of her mother, Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike, which sealed the presses of the Independent Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd in the 1970s, setting off a train of events that eventually led to its bankruptcy. The same government was responsible for the 1973 nationalisation of the Lake House group under the guise of broadbasing ownership. Ms Bandaranaike has lived to acknowledge that mistake. But her daughter is nowhere near implementing the PA's manifesto of fulfilling the stated intent of releasing Lake House from state control.

The contemporary history of Sri Lanka abundantly demonstrates that newspapers cannot make or break governments and that is something that the rulers must take to heart. Admittedly, the ownership structure of the press has a somewhat incestuous relationship with politics. One group of national newspapers is controlled by Ranjit Wijewardene, whose nephew, Ranil Wickremesinghe, leads the UNP. Another is owned by a group headed by Seevali Ratwatte, Ms Bandaranaike's younger brother. Mr Ratwatte's affection for his nephew, Anura, is well known.

Equally well known is the open war between Ms Kumaratunga and Anura Bandaranaike, who lost the leadership stakes in the Bandarnaike-founded Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to his sister. But while Lankans smile when President Kumaratunga says that "Ranil's uncle's papers" are not as bad as "my brother's uncle's papers", they will not take kindly to a political party which had promised a liberal media interfering with the press. Even in the worst days, Lankans have always been able to claim that, barring India, they have the freest press in South Asia. They would wish to keep it that way.