CPJ alarmed at call for media censorship

The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s brazen public call to censor the media and reintroduce criminal defamation laws.
“This is an open intimidation of the media,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “The Sri Lankan press sorely needs space to report independently on the escalating instability in the country, free of government intimidation.”
The newspaper group Wijeya, which publishes the Sunday Lankadeepa and several other widely circulated publications—including the English-language Sunday Times—and the broadcasting conglomerate Maharaja were singled out by the minister as examples of privately owned media groups that abuse their existing freedoms by reporting critically, according to the Free Media Movement translation, CPJ said.