{"id":48355,"date":"2015-10-01T16:01:20","date_gmt":"2015-10-01T23:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=48355"},"modified":"2015-10-01T16:01:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T23:01:20","slug":"prairie-awards-for-lankan-journalism-focus-on-manik-de-silva-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/10\/01\/prairie-awards-for-lankan-journalism-focus-on-manik-de-silva-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"PRAIRIE AWARDS FOR LANKAN JOURNALISM — Focus on Manik de Silva Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Shelton A. Gunaratne<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Professor of communication emeritus, MSUM, and lead author of Mindful Journalism and News Ethics in the Digital Era: A Buddhist Approach (New York: Routledge, 2015)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

PRAIRIE ROSES<\/strong>: To Manik de Silva, the septuagenarian editor of the\u00a0Sunday Island for his lifetime dedication to journalism in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 In an interview with Sanjana Hattotuwa of Groundviews (on March 7, 2010), Manik, the most senior and longest-serving editor of an English-language newspaper in Sri Lanka,\u201d confessed that his very liberal father\u201d Walwin A. de Silva, a former director of education and brother of renowned Trotskyite parliamentarian Colvin R. de Silva, arranged for him to work with the Observer newspaper at the age of 19 while awaiting the results of the University Entrance Examination, which he failed. However, his great, good fortune\u201d to work under the Denzil Peiris, editor of the Observer from 1960-1973 helped him to release the dukkha<\/em> resulting from his academic failure to enter the university though he excelled in writing as a school boy at the prestigious Royal College in Colombo.<\/p>\n

Like numerous other journalists, Manik was obsessed with craving (tanha<\/em>) and attachment (upadana<\/u><\/em>) to rise up and cling on to his professional career.<\/p>\n

He found journalism a fascinating field that enabled him to get a ringside view\u201d of what\u2019s happening in the country. In the old parliament, he savored the cut and thrust of the oratorical clashes of good people\u201d like Dudley Senanayake (1911-73), J. R. Jayewardene (1906-97), N. M. Perera (1905-79), Colvin R. de Silva (1907-87), Philip Gunawardena (1901-73), Felix Dias Bandaranaike (1930-85) and Pieter Keuneman (1917-97), who were among the best\u201d in the world. The \u201860s constituted the golden decade of the Lankan parliament, Manik told Hattotuwa. After hammering each other\u201d in debates on the floor, they would repair to the parliamentary restaurant and enjoy their tea together. Since then, while the number of parliamentarians has increased, their quality has precipitously declined primarily because of patronage giving and patronage taking,\u201d Manik rued.<\/p>\n

I suspect that Manik\u2019s ability to get political scoops through his connections with the powerful politicians of the day, thanks to his uncle Colvin and dad\u2019s Royal College schoolmate J. R. Jayewardene who became the all-powerful executive president of the country in 1978 after the UNP secured a two-thirds majority in the 1977 elections, facilitated his job as one of the Lake House reporters assigned to cover the parliamentary beat in the 1960s and the 1970s. By letting Manik have his byline with his parliamentary reports and other scoops,\u201d Denzil Peiris egged on the young man to elevate his illusionary self-esteem resulting in a degree of arrogance\u201d (dosa<\/em>) toward his colleagues.
\nI first met Manik in 1962, when I joined Lake House soon after I graduated from the University of Ceylon.\u00a0 During our five years together at Lake House, Manik (together with Thalif Deen, Neville de Silva, Leila Joseph, Phillip Fernando and a few other non-graduate journalists like H. L. D. Mahindapala, Nalin Fernando and Nihal Ratnaike) worked primarily for the Observer while I (together with Chris Gooneratne, Phillip Coorey, T. Sivaprakasam, Indres Allalasunderam, and a few others) worked primarily for the Daily News.\u00a0 I resigned from Lake House in mid-1967 after completing a one-year Fellowship at the World Press Institute then affiliated with Macalester College, Saint Paul.<\/p>\n

Manik had a similar opportunity to spend a year in the United States in 1972, when he got the offer of a Jefferson Fellowship to immerse in communication scholarship at the Harvard Center for International Affairs. I suspect that having failed to get a university education, Manik made good use of his Harvard year to prove that he was no intellectual dummy. The same year, I earned a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Minnesota. (Incidentally, it was also in 1972 that Lake House let Thalif Deen to do a master\u2019s degree in journalism at Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship, whereafter he settled down in New York as a bureau chief for the Inter Press Service.) But unlike me who quit Lake House after completing my WPI training because Ernest Corea, the Daily News editor (1964-70) refused to grant me another year\u2019s no-pay leave to complete graduate studies in journalism, Malik dutifully returned to Lake House to continue his journalism career as a state employee.<\/p>\n

Manik\u2019s Harvard year had the blessings of Mervyn de Silva whom the Lake House management headed by chairman Ranjith Wijeyawardene appointed as the chief editor of the Daily News in 1970. Mervyn\u2019s journalism style and views were consonant with those of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led United Front coalition (hathhavula<\/em>) government formed in 1970 replacing that of Dudley Senanayake\u2019s United National Party, which came into power after the March 1965 elections, which soundly rejected Mrs. Bandaranaike\u2019s vituperative campaign to take-over the Lake House newspapers because they allegedly served as UNP mouthpieces (pachapatra<\/em>).<\/p>\n

[I was the Daily News reporter who, together with D. C. Karunaratne of the Dinamina, covered the Bandaranaike election campaign in 1965. Fearing a 1965-rype setback if they had highlighted the priority they placed on the takeover.<\/p>\n

I suspect that Mervyn\u2019s appointment as the editor of the Lake House flagship was intended as a peace gesture to mollify the new United Front (hathhavula<\/em>) government, in hopes of preventing the possibility of a takeover.\u00a0 Moreover, the management elevated Mervyn by shunting the diehard UNP sympathizer Ernest Corea from the editor\u2019s chair of the Daily News to that of its sister newspaper, the Observer, when Denzil Peiris vacated the position. Mervyn\u2019s elevation, however, failed to scuttle the state takeover of Lake House in 1973, when the new dispensation anointed Mervyn as the editor in chief of all Lake House papers. The details pertaining to the takeover appear in my monograph titled The Taming of the Press in Sri Lanka\u201d which the Association or Education in Journalism published as Journalism Monographs No. 39 in May 1975.<\/p>\n

Both Mervyn and Ernest, who habitually flaunted their verbal skills and professed punditry unaware of the mental distress (dukkha<\/em>) they caused others, had to face the consequences of their intentional actions (embedded in their sankhara<\/em> aggregate).<\/p>\n

[Ernest Corea was proud to reveal that he was a descendent of Edirille Rala who was crowned the king of Kotte and Sitawaka in 1596.\u00a0 Both Ernest and Mervyn came from a Westernized Christian background and had no inclination to foster a Lankan news culture conducive to the emergence of what we now call mindful journalism. Corea, who understood that his prospects of recovery under the hathhavula<\/em> were very dim, emigrated overseas in 1973 to avoid further reprisals (dukkha<\/em>). After he spent a short stint as features editor of the Straits Times in Singapore, the UNP government of President Jayewardene rewarded his service as a propagandist by appointing him as Sri Lanka ambassador to the U. S. and high commissioner to Canada.].<\/p>\n

Mervyn\u2019s mind-consciousness also failed to discipline the power of the five aggregates that caused his downfall in 1976, just before the abject defeat of the UF government and the emergence of\u00a0\u00a0 UNP leader Jayewardene as the first executive president of Sri Lanka. Following a tiff with A. K. Premadasa, the Matara-born legal luminary whom the UF government appointed as the first chairman (1973-77) of Lake House under state control, Mervyn left Lake House to become the editor in chief of the bankrupt Times newspaper group, which the Jayewardene government placed under state control in 1978 and sold to Ranjit Wijeyawardene as compensation for forfeiting his ownership of Lake House. Mervyn found solace as the editor of a weekly rag, the Lanka Guardian, which depended heavily on donations from various foundations.<\/p>\n

Manik was quite aware of the impending uncertainties that journalists would face following the state takeover in 1973, the year he returned to work. In the 2010 interview with Hattotuwa, Manik recalled the prophetic observation of journalist D. C. Karunaratne in 1972 that from then onwards Lake House would have a convulsion after each election\u201d proved to be accurate.<\/p>\n

Mervyn\u2019s rise and fall at lake House coincided with the rise and fall of Sirimavo Bandaranaike\u2019s United Front government, of which Manik\u2019s uncle Colvin was a minister. J. R. Jayewardene, who ousted the Bandaranaike government, was also a friend of Manik\u2019s father. He probably figured out that if he played his cards with aplomb, he could not be a loser whichever political party was in power. This line of reasoning explains his inclination for practicing a non-aggressive but yet adversarial type of journalism that reflects a healthy degree of tension between the government and the press. In the Hattotuwa interview, he asserted that good governance required investigative reporting, which was not possible to practice without causing political distress (dukkha<\/em>) for the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Shelton A. Gunaratne Professor of communication emeritus, MSUM, and lead author of Mindful Journalism and News Ethics in the Digital Era: A Buddhist Approach (New York: Routledge, 2015) PRAIRIE ROSES: To Manik de Silva, the septuagenarian editor of the\u00a0Sunday Island for his lifetime dedication to journalism in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 In an interview with Sanjana […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shelton-gunaratne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}