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http://www.news.lk/home/18733-churnalism-in-channel-4

‘Churnalism’ in Channel 4

Friday, 19 August 2011 12:52

Duplicity in the battle of terror

The British government is considering bringing in emergency regulations to deal with rioting. The Sri Lankan government is considering repealing the emergency regulations brought in to deal with the LTTE, the worst terrorist organization known to man.

Nevertheless, the British government continues to criticize the way Sri Lanka conducted the “war on terror” within its own borders, states Irish journalist Padraig Colman, in reference to the Channel 4 allegations raised against Sri Lanka via the infamous video entitled The Sri Lankan Killing Fields.

“The Sri Lankan government made a decision in 2006 to push for a military victory over the LTTE who had been fighting for nearly 30 years for a separate state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. In May 2009, the Tamil Tigers were comprehensively defeated. There have been no acts of terrorism in Sri Lanka since then, which is a great relief after the horrors suffered over decades”, Colman writes. He also stresses that Sri Lanka today is safer than the UK according to the MTRI (Maplecroft Terrorism Risk Index).

He mentions that all of the Tamil political parties who had fought for a separate state have now agreed to enter the democratic political process and many of them have joined the government in the reconciliation and reconstruction process.

“However, the country has not been able to enjoy peace to the full because there have been persistent allegations that war crimes were perpetrated towards the end of the war”, he says.

Responding to the charges raised by the Channel 4 Video which he associates with ‘churnalism’, a term coined by BBC journalist Waseem Zakir that conveys the idea: “a harbinger of the end of news journalism”, Colman notes, “if enough dodgy allegations are gathered together they gain some credibility purely from their critical mass”.
“This is something akin to those urban myths that gather moss on the internet. If a rumour appears on a lot of websites or blogs it gets quoted again and again and the mere accumulation is seen as proof”, he adds.

http://pcolman.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/channel-4-news-and-sri-lankan-war-crimes/