President Mahinda Rajapaksa has told a group of media heads that, inter alia, there is no cause for the media to fear his government. He may have sought to reassure them in the wake of the brutal assassination of The Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickremetunga and the arson attack on the MTV studio complex last week. His powwow with media bosses was a step in the right direction in these troubled times and his reassurance is welcome.

But, it needs to be added that no media person worth his or her salt fears any government.

Similarly, there is no cause for President Rajapaksa or his government to fear the media, if he is confident that he has the people on his side. Since the announcement of his candidacy for the 2005 presidential polls, it may be recalled, he has come a long way in spite of a largely hostile press. When he entered the presidential fray, most media institutions ganged up against him including those who had been his bosom pals. He was without support from even a section of State media under the control of the Chandrika faction opposed to him. A vast majority of privately owned media institutions tried every trick in the book to engineer his defeat. They unleashed scathing attacks on him and even carried the results of bogus pre-polls surveys which projected him as the loser at a closely contested election. An SMS survey conducted by one of them even predicted a landslide victory for his opponent. But, in the end he emerged the winner! In fact the real loser was not the UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe but the media that backed him. Its credibility suffered a huge blow.

However, President Rajapaksa continued to get bad press even after his election. In trying to dislodge the government his detractors lost balance and out of sheer desperation to see the back of his administration they started to pull for the LTTE, which they thought would beat the military once again and thereby help topple the government. When the LTTE captured the Mavil Aru anicut, they found themselves on cloud nine, as they thought, at last, the Rajapaksa government would meet its Waterloo.

Some of the media personnel and their NGO handlers chose to act as the LTTE's auxiliaries in the South discrediting as they did the military and the country. Worse, they went the whole hog to break the nation's will to battle terrorism by drilling into people's heads a myth that the LTTE was far superior to the armed forces and therefore invincible. Even the impressive military victories such as the liberation of the Eastern Province were scoffed at and the paper and TV Tigers claimed the military would be decimated in the North, where the LTTE had its stronghold. Wide publicity was given to the bankrupt political elements all out to scuttle the war effort. They engaged the government on several other fronts. They had no qualms about joining forces with some ambassadorial bad eggs and NGO hit men to deprive the country of the GSP Plus concession by projecting it as a killing field. They did not give two hoots about the future of hundreds of thousands of poor workers who would have been thrown out of their jobs in case of that privilege being scrapped much to the detriment of the garment industry.

None of those methods aimed at saving the Tigers worked and the LTTE is now cornered in Mullaitivu having lost almost all his bastions including its 'administrative capital', Kilinochchi. The government has also been winning elections. Now that the Tigers are on their last legs, some of their media backers have already made a U-turn. They are now becoming more anti-LTTE than even the so-called hawks much to the chagrin of their NGO chums.

However, the present government must not dupe itself into believing that everything is hunky dory simply because it has so far managed to keep a hostile media at bay and try to stifle dissent by branding all its critics as LTTE sympathizers and tarring and feathering them.

This is not the first government to have survived a hostile media. It was perhaps the Premadasa regime that withstood the worst ever media onslaught. President Premadasa was lucky that there were no independent television and radio stations, internet and e-mail. But, several alternative publications came up to launch virulent attacks against him and his government. He struck back with might and main and went all out to suppress the media. It was arrogance of power that finally marked the beginning of the end of President Premadasa’s government which would have fallen even if the LTTE had failed to assassinate him. His assassination only gave an impetus to the collapse of the UNP regime after 17 long years. The present regime is also being consumed with the same arrogance of power as its predecessors, if how some of its members ride roughshod over their detractors is any indication.

However welcome President Rajapaksa's reassurance to the media may be, as was said earlier, the only way he can allay whatever fears journalists and media owners may have of his government and clear suspicions in the public mind as to its involvement in attacks on the media is to bring the culprits responsible for those incidents to justice. If those attacks are consequent to a conspiracy as the government claims, let the conspirators be exposed and dealt with appropriately.