Media Ministry Monitoring More Websites
By Indika Sri Aravinda
The Media Ministry says it is monitoring the activities of around 4 to 5 websites which publish mostly gossip news and are also not registered.
Media Ministry Secretary W. B. Ganegala said that instructions had been issued over and over again for news websites operating in Sri Lanka to be registered.
However he said that so far only 45 websites have registered with the government information department while many others have not.
He said that most websites which have not registered with the government operate in a manner which violates media ethics.
The Media Ministry secretary warned that action will be taken against websites which fail to register and at the same time publish defamatory content.
On the raid conducted last week on the office of the Sri Lanka Mirror website, Ganegala said that two other websites were operating from the premises of Sri Lanka Mirror.
He said that one of these sites had published content factually incorrect and slandering President Mahinda Raqjapaksa.
The Ministry of Mass Media and Information last November ordered the telecom companies to block access to five websites. It also issued a directive for all the websites carrying Sri Lankan news to register with the Ministry.
The Court in its ruling said that registering was needed to safeguard people from being vilified and defamed among others as people needed to know who was behind the websites in order to seek remedies.
How do developed nations deal with this? Do they send police to raid media institutions and harass journalists and bloggers?
We have very ignorant ministers and a similarly ignorant president. If defamatory content is published by anyone, including websites and newspapers, then there is legal recourse for that. It is not the job of the media ministry to ask people to register to know their owners to intimidate and harass them.
To obtain ownership information of any website, a court must issue an order after it has determined there is sufficient grounds to provide law enforcement officials with such info. Sri Lanka’s authoritarian regime wants to bypass laws, rights and freedoms and no Sri Lankan should stand for that!
We strive to become a developed nation but continue to allow our politicians to destroy our progress towards our goals with such actions – how ironic!
There is no law passed in the house regarding registration of Websites. Where is the freedom of publication. Did you see how it operates in the UK ?. Anyone can critic of anyone in a true democracy. Ganegala must know that
its not gossip, its the truth these websites are publishing
Excellent…………
Sri lankan society is so divided….
Either it must unite or some one must take the initiative to unite it.
Be it the media, politics, religion, ethnicity, caste, the external forces with hidden agendas are having a field day.
We are our own enemies due to being blinded by greed and power.