Media, the biggest loser in Presidential election

Some say there are two winners at the recently concluded presidential race as opposed to the conventional ‘I win you lose’ theory that is normally observed in any type of election. Now it is becoming quite a popular quip among the political circles that along with President Mahinda Rajapaksa, opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe too has won a race of a different sort.
This editorial is not about the winners. It’s about the losers. It’s actually about a loser of a different sort—one who did not have a clue about the psyches of the Sri Lankan people, one who did not feel the pulse of the people and the one who never dared to go beyond its geographical boundaries to seek truth.
I’m not talking about a candidate who was in the defeated side. I’m talking about the one who didn’t contest, but lost nonetheless—us, the media.
According to media circles, hardly any media institution expected incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa to win the election with such a colossal margin, because the sentiment reflected in the country’s metropolitan showed a somewhat different picture. None of us dared to even secretly wish for this; not even the state media. Everyone seemed to be expecting the election to be a close one.
It was based on this interpretation that we wrote, we talked and television programmes were conducted to inform our readers, listeners and viewers. When we saw the enthusiasm of the people to caste their votes in almost all parts of the country except North and East on election day, we thought we were simply correct.
But, when the election results started flowing in, the close fight we had predicted was far to see. In fact, it was not at all there! President Rajapaksa won the election with an overwhelming margin of 1.8 million votes.
We, the media people, the species that boast ‘I know what you did last summer’ have miserably failed in this election. The ‘all knowing’ us couldn’t feel the pulse of the Sri Lankan people and understand their psyche.
We undermined the conventional practice of gratitude by the Sri Lankan people. We failed to hear what the silent lot of this country was saying, but only heard the shouting of a few. We especially never understood the psyche of the rural people of Sri Lanka.
So, I think it is reasonable to say that we’ve miserably failed in this election that was concluded last week. People kept their cool while we went into town with various high sounding surveys and findings about who’s going to win and who’s going to lose and with what margin. People silently voted for the person who they thought would be best to steer the country ahead in the next six years while we were lost in a labyrinth of speculation.
Now it is the high time for all the media institutions to go beyond boundaries of the metropolitan. They may have already reached the rural folks of the country with various initiatives and programmes, but this election and our inability to predict the behaviour of the people showed that we the media still has a long way to go.
Ironically, it was us who got impressed, excited, flabbergasted and even feared by seeing what we presented in our own writings, voice cuts and telecasts meant for the general public by joining hands with the city folks. This was where we all went wrong. We mistakenly interpreted that the views of the city folks would be mirrored in all other parts of the country, which of course did not happen.
As this election proved to be a blunder for the coalition who raced against President Rajapaksa, this election also proved a blunder for almost all the media institutions in the country which failed to realise the pulse of the people. Of course even though we lost, most of the media institutions must have made a killing out of election oriented advertising.