NewsCurry Breaking news and serving it up in pieces
An association representing several leading mass media organisations in Sri Lanka has said that editors of publications and news directors at electronic news channels agreed that good journalism constitutes merely reporting propaganda verbatim and that no further context or analysis is required to give their readers a rounded picture of the stories they report on.
A spokesman said, “Our job is to inform readers and if we are only given one side to a story by minister then we will publish it as is. If we provide more context to a piece of news that means that people will come away and be able to form an opinion based on all the angles presented. However, we are better off spending all our efforts to make sure all angles of advertisements are covered. Then having taken money from competing organisations users can select the product they want and be left with a narrow view of the news, which fuels ignorance, apathy, fear and causes unnecessary tensions.”
“With news, especially political stories, we feel that the more one-sided the story the better as then we can increase the number of stories we publish when we print rebuttals and generate enough clickbait articles that in turn increase our advertisement impressions. For TV it means all we have to do is attend press conferences and edit some footage. which saves a lot of money. If they want analysis, people can Google it,” he added.
