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The People's Alliance Government firmly believes that full democracy can never be achieved in any country without the freedom of the media. What we lack very much in this country today is media persons with a backbone who can stand up to what is right and wrong and not heed every order of their bosses whether they be in the State media or in the private media. "We are open to criticism of any of our faults. Journalists should think of the larger interests of society when they wield the pen," she added. Those journalists who opposed the then Governments were carried away by unidentified gunmen into the darkness of the night. We never resorted to such inhuman tactics. ''I never usurped my powers as Executive President to harass any journalist. The days when media personnel opposed to the Government, were found floating in the sea as corpses are things of the past about which we should be ashamed,'' she said. Commenting on the news that a certain editor of a weekend newspaper has been punished by the courts of law for defaming the President, she said: "I can say that petitioning the courts was the only right I had and the only right I exercised as any woman in this country,'' President Kumaratunga said. It is high time that we took a lesson from the high standard of media morality in our neighbouring India. Although we are in the same South East Asian region as two separate countries Sri Lanka has a great deal to learn from the high standard of media morality which pervades in India today. ''As a person who ran the SLFP newspaper on a daily basis for eight years without a single advertisement and still achieved a profit, I can say that I too have a certain amount of experience of the problems that confront journalists today'', she said.
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