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[home]>[programmes]>[media]>3rd
workshop
Covering Political Violence: Focus Sri Lanka
and the southern media grid, Chennai , Nov 29-Dec 1, 2002.
It was organised in association with the Asian College of
Journalism. It injected a ‘continuing professional education’ quality to
workshop. Chennai as a venue made it possible for SAFHR to open up the
inaugural session to the wider media and intellectual community of
Chennai. In addition the closing event was transformed into a public
forum for interaction between visiting media practitioners and ACJ
students.
The inaugural session was structured around the keynote address of
Prof Jayadeva Uynagoda on ‘Understanding Political Violence in a
Fragmented Environment: Shaping the political Discourse in Sri Lanka’.
Deliberately SAFHR involved a non media professional to open up theme of
the routinization of violence as the language of politics and its
consequences for society’s brutalization and the difficulties of
transitioning towards a post violence politics. Sri Lanka was a society
coming out of 18 years of protracted violent conflict and the search was
on for a transformative beyond violence politics that could recreate the
political realm as a space for pluralist and emancipatory conversations
across communities. A fundamentally disabling characteristic of the
politics of violence is that it freezes all possibilities for
communication across communities.
Arguing against the ‘instrumentalist use of violence’ Uyangoda’s
walked us through the history of ideas and practices of political
violence (including his own involvement in the JVP violence) It led him
to reject the claim that counter state, counter authority and counter
hegemonic violence is necessarily emancipatory. In particular, Sri
Lanka’s ethnic violence embodies the paradox of nationalism that gives
rise to and necessitates political violence in an instrumentalist form
i.e. violence in defense of its unity and integrity and that through
violence can an emerging nation be born. The search is for an
alternative paradigm to politics as coercive power.
The discussant was N Ram, editor Frontline who expanded the
relevance of Uyangoda’s frame to developments in India and factored in
the role of the media in exacerbating conflicts. However he warned
against suppressing hard questions in blind support of the peace
process. He flagged off one of the central concerns of the workshop -
the media as peace partisan and provocatively asked –‘is it the function
of the media to do propaganda for peace?’ The peace journalism way of
reporting to be credible has to ask the hard questions, but alongside to
emphasise context, to enable a more complex understanding of the ‘why’
of violence beyond ethnic stereotyping. The alternative approach of
‘conflict sensitive’ reporting was proposed. Clearly ‘sensitive’
reporting and ‘peace journalism’ way of reporting are in the end,
another way of arguing for credible responsible reportage.
In the discussions, journalists candidly raised the issue of the
media being partisan, exposing the limitations of a professional frame
of ‘covering both sides’ as equals objectivity but excludes multiple
sides. Television journalist Paneerselvan with extreme candour argued
against an objectivity which reproduced an upper caste, anglicised
middle class point of view and argued for being partisan ‘to make the
media more responsible and more inquisitive’.
At the workshop were about 27 journalists, media theorists and
cultural studies scholars, predominantly from the Sri Lankan and
southern media. It facilitated an interesting dialectic of the Indian
media in conversation with the ‘insider’ Sri Lankans. It produced no
polarized ‘nationalist’ positions, instead it fostered a sense of
professional solidarity among South Asian journalists. There was also
the axis of the contesting hegemonies between the national or mainstream
media and regional or local media, i.e. the view from New Delhi and the
view from Chennai. The substantial presence of journalists from the
regional (vernacular) language television media provided an opportunity
to examine the assumption of alternate media sites for contesting a
homogenizing hegemony. However as Sashi Kumar, Director of Media
Development Foundation argued, “more turned out to be less and with an
inevitable dumbing down process”.
In Sri Lanka there is an ethnically and linguistically differentiated
media. Lakshman Gunasekre of the Sunday Observer explored the Sri
Lankan media’s role in the constitution of a community with consequences
for the reproduction of the politics of violent ethnicities. He mapped
out a model of social communication that not only factored in the
political economy of the media and the editorial process of news
production but placed in the loop the audience.
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