Silencing who? We all live in moribound fear of the local and national politician after all!

AND NO AMOUNT OF MEDIA FREEDOM IS GOING TO CHANGE THAT UNTIL WE ARE ABLE TO EDUCATE THE PEOPLE TO REALIZE HOW THEY ARE BEING MANIPULATED AND BY WHOM

There was a hilariously entertaining event at the Royal College yesterday, where Sanjana Hattotuwa (SH) was pitted against Malinda Seneviratne (MS) moderated over by Eran Wickremaratne titled – “Silencing Sri Lanka – The future of Social Media and Online Citizen Journalism in a Stifled Democracy.”

I believe neither of whom are qualified to speak on this subject, though they are both engaged in writing in English to the English speaking mass who don’t amount to a hill of beans in Sri Lanka. So they are BOTH irrelevant to the debate, though SJ tried to imply that due to his monitoring 35 radical Sinhala websites & FB sites, for racist drivel, he is entitled to comment on the Sinhala Blogosphere! MS was on about his paper’s case against Multinationals, which was completely at a tangent to the topic, and ironically he was the person who complained that many people were talking at each other rather than on the topic in question.

Be that as it may, there was SH who I term an NGO wallah who survives for his breakfast on the backs of Western INGOs and classically represents their interests and speaks their language and appears to be their darling! On the other hand MS is a rabidly anti-American US educated arrogant and pompous person, propounding piety who had the gall to call us Lankans immensely arrogant and self righteous who was promptly called to task on that comment by SH, who is just as much in the same mould! Both therefore peas of the same pod!

Either way the whole discussion was mired in semantics, and more in line with the intellectual dining room gossip of Colombo drawing rooms, and NOT at all related to the suffering of the masses of Sri Lankans trying to survive in an era of impunity, where the Govt. is stealing money from their mouths to fund their extravagance and NO AMOUNT of silenced or not media is going to help them until they grow up to understand what is exactly happening to them.

It is the education stupid, and with all the uneducated Journalists faffing around, unable to write a story in a real investigative and in depth manner, even if there was COMPLETE MEDIA FREEDOM, they will NOT address the real issues of the day, as that profession is dead in the water. Needs new blood – all of it.

It will not change until we are able to educate our youth to realize that they can become world class journalists, able to dissect a story so the reader is ABLE TO DECIPHER the right and wrong of it for him or herself. NOT currently possible.

SO much for silencing media, freedom only comes with education, and we must educate the people on the podium before we get down to the people!