Veteran journalists in media training institutions are more productive than academics

"We still have excellent journalists left in Sri Lanka who could train future generation of journalists and there is an urgent need to utilize their talents in media training institutions rather than academics before they depart from this world. I now see a vacuum in professional journalism, ethics and mores."

by Pearl Thevanayagam

(October 11, London,Sri Lanka Guardian) Until I finished reading America’s Third World Economy by Paul Craig Roberts in Sri Lanka Guardian yesterday I did not realize he was an editor of the Wall Street Journal. His prose, simple yet effective, on the way the Amercian economy is going was not riddled with quotes from past economists or this theory or that. This story on US economy which would otherwise have been overlooked by the average reader was so interesting and absorbing through Mr Roberts’ clever usage of plain English that I am sure he got his message through to the widest possible readership.

Wall Street Journal, the most prestigious newspaper in the US and across the world along with Times, International Herald Tribune, The Economist and in the UK The Telegraph and The Guardian only recruit the crème de la crème. I remember asking the personnel manager at New York Times while I was on a tour organised by UC Berkeley how one could apply to work in that prestigious newspaper. His snooty reply was, “You do not apply. We call you”.

There is a clear absence of verbosity and pomposity when you read these newspapers because the journalists themselves are so sure of facts and figures of what they are writing they do not need props such as famous quotes from economists, theorists and scholars. The journalists themselves are the scholars. I was over the moon when I was chosen among the Asia-Pacific Fellows to obtain work experience at the Wall Street Journal in Washington DC for a month and I was very nervous to be working alongside journalists of the highest calibre. I was told I should wear suits instead of jeans and T-shirt and I spent enough time carefully choosing my wardrobe for Washington.

It was to my total disappointment that I found WSJ staff to be very ordinary and unassuming. I remember Alan Carr, a dishevelled middle-aged journalist who used to bring his wife in a wheel chair (she was suffering from multiple sclerosis) everyday because there was no one to care for her at home. He was a very senior financial journalist who had bylines daily. Then there was Tim Carrington, a dashingly good-looking journalist who took me along to Capitol Hill to cover the Senate Hearings where I saw the late Senator Edward Kennedy voting on a Bill on Black issues. I was over-awed. At the end of my experience the deputy editor-in-chief Alan Murray himself invited me out for a pizza !!! What an honour I thought for a humble journalist from a third word country.

The lessons I learnt during my work experience at WSJ, BBC and Press Gazette and training at Reuters Foundation in the UK is that you can sex up boring subjects such as business stories and make them enjoyable. You certainly do not need to cram into one piece of story all the data and business jargons such as economic indicators and consumer confidence without explaining what these actually mean to the average reader. Manik de Silva and his protégés Mohan Samarasinghe and the late Preethi Kodagoda ( Preethi passed away in her prime which is indeed a sad loss to business journalism) come to mind who can deliver business stories with a punch. The temptation is always there to show off some new words you have discovered and this temptation needs to be done away with as the late Bonnie Fernando used to tell us in journalism classes in the late eighties, He said, “murder your darlings”. In other words use plain English if it could effectively send the message more than your sophisticated jargons.

Locally you do not see Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena, Sinha Ratnatunga and late Lasantha Wickrematunga, all of them lawyers by profession as well, push law down your throat by citing every article and clause in constitutional law books when they write on the subject. Kurakkan pittu is good for nutrition but too much of it can cause constipation. They write in easy flowing style that you know exactly what they are talking about even though the subject needs clear understanding, expertise and knowledge.

I am not sure media training institutions prepare our journalists to write to newspapers and blogs or speak fluently and clearly on radio and television since mostly they are staffed by academics and hence the un-necessary academic jargon seeping into news reporting, features and reviews. Broadcast journalists such as Arun Dias Bandaranaike, Merle Williams, Anthea Peiris, Nihal Bharathi, late Ravi John, Vijaya Corea and Eric Fernando among others are so easy on your ears and their eloquent flow of words keep you entertained and informed. Theirs is a fine tradition which is slowly dying in the wake of video killing the radio stars as we modern TV journalists more concerned about their attire than delivery.

We still have excellent journalists left in Sri Lanka who could train future generation of journalists and there is an urgent need to utilize their talents in media training institutions rather than academics before they depart from this world. I now see a vacuum in professional journalism, ethics and mores. We see an ever-increasing sycophantic and partisan journalism which does not bode well for what is left of the democracy in Sri Lanka and to foster independent journalism devoid of the shackles of subservience, greed, selfish interest and sycophancy we need impartial media professionals.