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| Tuesday, 30 March 2004 |
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by Indeewara Thilakaratne and Ranga Chandrarathne The Center for Policy Alternatives in a statesment issued at a press conference yesterday said that a four paged document produced by the Daily News and attributed to the CPA clearly appeared to be a fabrication. "The Headline story of the Daily News on March 20 ,2004 , titled "Impressive Freedom Alliance lead in independent opinion poll " contained a number of distortions and fabrications,' said Excutive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), Dr. Pakiasothy Sarawanamuttu addressing the press briefing at CPA yesterday. He said that nowhere in the survey conducted by the Social Indicator, the polling unit of the CPA, such questions were asked on the honesty of the Presidents and the Prime Minister, which party has more chance to come to power,whereas the article in the Daily News states that these questions were part of the survey and goes on to provide the results of the survey containing statistical analysis which were not in the CPA report. He emphasised that he wrote to the Editor of the Daily News pointing out that the poll had been misreported and that he listed the inaccuracies in the article.However, the Daily News responded stating that the article was based on a report sent to them by the CPA and the Daily News stood by the report. "My response to both the Dinamina as well as Daily News headline stories was to point out to them that those articles contained distortions as well as fabrications. In particular I pointed out in my letter that it contained questions which were naver asked in the survey conducted by the CPA and also they provided answers purportedly to be results of these questions. Second was a question that they asked and said that Sinhala Buddhist community felt a threat from the Church and from donor countries who were pushing their culture and it also talked about donor countries' diluting Sri Lankan and Sinhala Buddhist culture in particular. I have to point out in my opinion that this was a absolute fabrication and distortion and that it was calculated to mislead the voting public and also to lessen the credibility of organisations such as ours, particularly with regard to questions which had the potential of inflaming and poisoning the relationships among people of different religious faiths", he added. The CPA report was a bound volume consisting of 25 numbered pages, all of which were copyrighted to CPA/Social Indicator with the copyright mark. The report contained an Executive Summary.Any responsible journalist would have been troubled by the idea of basing an article,all the more so a headline story , on an unauthenticated loose leaf document which on the face of it was not attributed to any person or organisation. The CPA has written to Media Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, requesting that an independent investigation should be conducted into this matter. |
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