Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation is the company that primarily handles Sri Lanka's radio.

INTERVIEW WITH: Angelo Fernando covers media issues in his writing for Sri Lanka. He has spent many years living and working in Sri Lanka. He was referred to me through Marilyn Cormier, from the President's Office at St. Michael's College, in Colchester, Vt.

Q: What is it the dominant media form? Why?
A: TV is somehow still a big influence, and newspapers seem to lag behind TV and radio.

Q: How much is the Internet used? Is it too expensive or is there no power structure set up?
A: Internet penetration is still low, because it is mainly in the urban areas. Having said that, many rural projects have community centers that bring the Internet to the village.

Q: What are the economic and political biases in the news? (Is the media swayed by the government?) Is there free speech? Is there censorship?
A: The economic bias in the news depends on which media you analyze. State TV and radio tend to push a more welfare state bias. The private radio stations are very strong, even in the rural areas, and there are FM Sinhalese and Tamil broadcasts, some of them 24-hours.

Free speech is pretty strong. Successive governments have tried to censor certain aspects of news, when it came to reporting terrorism activities. They never quite succeeded. We went through a bad period in 1989-91, with a near dictatorship, and one journalist, a friend, was killed. That was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

Right now there may be a veiled censorship, but if you read papers like the Sunday Leader, you will find no evidence of this. It bashes the president and the cabinet on a full-time basis. The editor was sued and I think he lost, but nothing has come of it.

Q: Who is doing the censoring if it does exist? Is media a tool for government propaganda? How or why?
A: The media is pretty independent -- except for the state-run operations. Rupavahini is the state television station. SLBC is the radio station, and the Ceylon Daily News (sometimes we call it the Daily Noise!) are the three.

Click on one of the other names to hear his or her thoughts about Sri Lanka's media and culture.

Ian Barrow, professor of history at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt. He did a project entitled Research in Sri Lanka: British Colonial Surveying in Sri Lanka, 1796-1850.
Marilyn Cormier grew up in Sri Lanka and moved to the United States when she was young. She now works as the director of Community Relations in the Office of the President at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt.
Rukman De Silva, a graduate student from Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.