Post War Media Behavior in Sri Lanka

Three decades of civil war which was recently ended in Sri Lanka can be considered as one of the most brutal conflicts in the Asian region.The content of the both electronic and print media in Sri Lanka have been dominated with the war related information during the past three decades.Especially, during the final stages of the war there was no notable space for other information as everything was written and reported on war.There was a clearly visible competition among national newspapers to attract the readership with content of war.Since the end of the war, newspapers found it difficult to keep their readers with ordinary news and they started reporting crimes and other sensitive incidents to attract readers.This paper discuses the post war media behavior in Sri Lanka with special reference to National newspapers in the country.Discourse analysis is conducted on four selected newspapers representing both government and private sector newspapers.As the war ended in may 2009, the study is conducted on randomly selected newspapers from January 2010 to March 2012.The analysis is limited to the news content in the front pages of the newspapers.Though there are many studies have been conducted on the media behavior during the war, there is no study has been done to examine the significances of the post war media behavior in the country and also no recent study has been done in the region regarding post conflict media behavior.The research is conducted with the hypotheses that the newspapers have exaggeratedly reported crimes to catch readers.Though the initial study clearly indicates the domination of crime related content in newspapers, the research aims to identify whether there is an increase in the crimes in the country as the media reported or it is an exaggeration created by media in the post war context.