The Sri Lankan government blocks access from within Sri Lanka to TamilNet, a website hosted in Norway which provides news reports on local events. The move came just days after the 10th anniversary of TamilNet’s creation.
Sources
TamilNet blocked in Sri Lanka, BBC Sinhala, 20 June 2007;
Quotations
“The ban on Tamilnet is the first instance of what the FMM believes may soon be a slippery slope of web & Internet censorship in Sri Lanka. … This is a significant turn in the erosion of media freedom in Sri Lanka and clearly demonstrates the extent to which media is censored and the free flow of information curtailed, without any accountability, transparency or judicial oversight.” Free Media Movement statement.
Opinion
“Under Sivaram’s guidance, and in accordance with his theories, however, TamilNet.com was quickly transformed into a working news agency, with its own independent reporters and editors, its own physical plant, and its own editorial style: a tone, basically, as dry and authoritarian as that of Reuters or the Associated Press, and with an even more passionate emphasis on the need for all reporting to be backed by tape-recordings, double sourcing, and documents in hand. The real key to TamilNet.com’s success here, though, was not only that it collected and edited its own news in a professional manner, but that it collected this news from indigenous reporters living in the most rural parts of Tamil Sri Lanka, rather than from (as was the case with the other news services) reporters from the twin ‘capitals’ of the crisis, Colombo and Jaffna.
“Moreover, TamilNet.com did all its work incredibly cheaply: for only US$2000 a month. For all these reasons, and this is the second most remarkable thing about it, TamilNet.com soon became a kind of world template, for it was one of the first (if not actually the first) strictly web-based, indigenously created, news agencies in the world; and as such its design has since been widely copied.
“Domestically, all the independent Sri Lankan dailies regularly run TamilNet.com reports in their papers – even if only, sometimes, to try and dispute them in their editorial pages. Internationally, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC, who between them control most of the flow of news about Sri Lanka to the rest of the world, often cite or must otherwise reflect TamilNet.com reports,” Mark Whittaker, The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka, Learning Politics from Sivaram, 2007
Related events
29 April 2005
