Channel 4 News must choose between journalism and advocacy propaganda regarding Sri Lanka

Engage Sri Lanka’s media monitoring project, Sri Lanka Media Watch, has called upon Britain’s Channel 4 News programme to choose between legitimate journalism and advocacy propaganda in its focus on Sri Lanka.

In its most recent programme, “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished”, screened on 14 March 2012, Channel 4 News sought to make new claims regarding the last few weeks of the Sri Lankan civil war, fought between the government and LTTE rebels, which ended in May 2009. This was the second hour-long programme made by Channel 4 News on the subject. The coordinator of Sri Lanka Media Watch, Peter Walker, restated the comment he made about the first programme: “There is a name for those courts in which one person is the accuser, judge and jury: a kangaroo court. Channel 4’s programme was the journalist equivalent of such a court. Snow and his colleagues should stick to tabloid journalism, they make very poor lawyers.” Read more....