Reconciliation between Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka: Propaganda in Media Discourse

Abstract

This paper applies the ‘propaganda model’ of media operations developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media to the Sri Lankan Media’s discourse construction. Herman and Chomsky’s Model claims that elite media interconnect with other institutional sectors in ownership, management and social circles. This Model is applied to a discourse analysis of the selected editorials of the Sri Lankan English newspapers on the ethnic conflict resolution under international intervention during the period of Ceasefire Agreement (2002- 2006) between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. It traces an ethnonationalist ideological significance in their editorial construction projecting binary positions in the knowledge construction for governance and reconciliation.