Reproducing an article by Shelton A. Gunaratne that appeared in Colombo Telegraph
Perhaps for
the first time in the history of English language journalism in Sri Lanka, the
Sunday Observer has demonstrated the suitability and feasibility of using
mindful journalism as an option for the Anglo-American style of Orientalist
journalism that the oligopolistic wire services had spread worldwide since the
American Civil War.
I refer to
the exemplary editorial published in the Vesak issue of the Sunday
Observer
under the title “19A: Moment in History.” Obviously, the writer is someone who
is conversant with Eastern history and Buddhist literature, not a snob who wants
to disgorge his/her knowledge of Anglo-American history in defence of parliamentary
democracy.
S/he begins
the editorial with Buddha’s allusion to democratic practice in the Sakyan and
Vajjian tribal republics of eastern India that survived until the fourth
century BCE. Buddha was a staunch advocate of republican democracy. Other
tribal republics that practiced direct/representative/constitutional democracy
included those of the Licchavis, the Videhas, the Nayas, the Mallas, and the
Koliyas. But, as far as I know, this may be the first time that a mainstream
English language newspaper in Sri Lanka has traced principles of democratic
principles to sub continental Eastern history rather than to the West. If so,
this may signify the beginning of mindful journalism in the country because
editors are becoming mindful of their indefensible reification of the West as the
progenitor of democracy.
The Sunday
Island Vesak editorial also commendably dealt with a Buddhist theme although it
failed, in my opinion, to use the crux of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths—dukkha,
samudaya, nirodha, and magga—to substantiate the need for tolerance of
diversity within unity, to drive home the simple truth that most of our dukkha
is the result of our unwillingness to comprehend that there is no self because
all beings are composites of the Five Aggregates (material form, feelings,
perception, karmic/mental fabrications, and consciousness), which are in a
constant state of flux. Buddhism is not a religion but a phenomenology that
everyone can investigate through mindful meditation. People of all religions
can benefit from practicing Buddhist principles without compromising their own
religious principles. An editorial with such a thrust would have been a supreme
example of mindful reporting or journalism as a social good.
The Sunday
Times, on the other hand, failed to apply the mindful approach by focusing its
editorial on the diplomatic mission of the U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry
without making the slightest attempt to analyze Kerry’s word and deed to the Four
Noble Truths. Imagine an editorial writer’s audacity to defy the significance
of Vesak by giving priority to the town visit of a Yankee Doodle. However, the
Sunday Times had the good sense to publish a handful of in-depth Vesak features
written by Buddhists believers like Primrose Jayasinghe, Mervyn Samarakoon and
Ajahn Brahmavamso. But these articles were about special aspects of Buddhism;
therefore they did not reflect the deliberate practice of mindful journalism.
Mindful
journalism, as defined by contemporary communication scholars (see the book
Mindful Journalism and News Ethics in the Digital Era: A Buddhist Approach,
published by Routledge in 2015) is the application of 15 secular principles
drawn from the crux of Buddhism to the practice of journalism. It is a new
genre of reporting and writing to shift the current status of news as a
commodity to that of a social good.
Mainstream
journalism in Sri Lanka uses the news values devised by Western journalistic
philosophy to sell news as a commodity. It conventionally uses
significance/impact, prominence, proximity, timeliness, conflict/controversy,
relevance/currency, bizarre and the unusual as the criteria for judging what is
newsworthy. Impact signifies how many people are affected by an event. An example
is the earthquake in Nepal or the tsunami disaster in Sri Lanka.
Although
both mainstream and mindful journalism share impact as a news criterion, the
two parts company with regard to prominence (which emphasizes the high and the
mighty against the hoi polloi) and conflict/controversy. Buddhist principles
discourage class and caste distinctions because everything or being is
inconstant and dependent on one another (as evident in the concept of anatta)
thereby making dukkha coterminous with cyclic existence. Both genres share
timeliness in the sense of what’s occurring now rather than what has occurred
in the past or will occur in the future. But the Buddhist approach connects the
past and the future with the present through the fourth aggregate (sankhara)
whereas the mainstream approach is bereft of such insight. Both genres focus on
dukkha, the mainstream with its emphasis on negative news; and the mindful with
its positive approach to alleviate suffering.
Thus, the
two genres use the criteria of conflict and the unusual in different ways: the
mindful approach tries the “news as a social good” to deter the negative attributes
of the five aggregates from overpowering their positive attributes; and the
mainstream approach uses the “news as a commodity” approach by emphasizing
extreme freedom to let loose the aggregates of grasping with little concern for
morals and ethics.
The
mainstream approach depends heavily on conflict/controversy and the
unusual/bizarre criteria to generate “human interest” news to make journalism a
profitable enterprise. Thus it tends to sensationalize multifarious conflicts—political,
ethnic, religious, socio-cultural, regional, global, etc.—thereby adding to
suffering in samsara.
Mindful
journalism, in contrast, attempts to minimize suffering by producing news from
the angle of harmony (accommodating diversity within unity). Its intention is
to make news a social good rather than perpetuating it as a commodity for
making money.
The
practitioners of mindful journalism will avoid writing one-sided opinion
columns (as, for example, in the Colombo Telegraph) wherein citizen journalists
shoot from the hip to hurt their opponents and frequently use gossip as
evidence invariably mistaking such indulgence as freedom of speech or of the press.
Although a good many of these writers profess to be Buddhists, they do not
understand the Buddhist truth that by resorting to such ad hominem and
unsubstantiated attacks they hurt themselves because all of us are composites
of the Five Aggregates.
Mindful
journalism requires no top-down censorship. The mindful journalist has the
responsibility of adhering to a code of ethics of his own based on universally
accepted ethical/moral values embodied in the Buddhist five precepts and the
Sila dimension of the Middle Path—right action, right speech, and right
livelihood. All Buddhists believe that all parts of the “loka” is
interdependent, interconnected, and interactive. Such a view debunks the concept
of an absolutely free press—the Western concept of the idealistic Fourth
Estate.Freedom without responsibility is not possible.
The
intention of mindful journalism is not to eliminate mainstream journalism or
any other genre of journalism. Globalization means accommodating diversity
within unity. Rather than relegating mindful journalism as a particular deviant
from the mainstream, it could fit in as a commensurate part of the practice of
journalism in its full complexity. Mindful journalism requires the modification
of current news values to adjust to the socio-cultural needs of our native land
rather than blindly following those nurtured in the West with their roots in
Greece and Rome.
Obviously,
Buddhist and Hindu values are more pertinent to Sri Lanka while not ignoring
the values of other cultures that compete with ours in the natural process of
ongoing globalization or evolutionism. Globalization is a natural process
whereas Westernization is not because the latter is a cultural imposition of
the former colonial powers.
*Shelton A. Gunaratne – Professor Emeritus – Minnesota
State University Moorhead
