Dear Mr.Dilith Jayaweera / Mr. Reyynor Silva,

Our nation is navigating this difficult time with lots of losses of jobs, business close-downs and in general a widespread fear of death and sickness. On top of all of this, we are experiencing a noise of racism and bigotry from media outlets and social media.

We, the general public regardless of religion/caste/race or any sort of divide have watched your media outlets Derana & Hiru bullying the minorities in all forms and your consistent bigotry throughout the recent years. We saw the last peak of it during the presidential election and now we are seeing another wave of the same.

Although we firmly believe in free speech, we do not believe in racism that put our citizens in fear or risk of hate acts. 

SARS-COV-2, commonly known as "coronavirus" is a virus that is all new to which scientists from far more developed nations around the world haven't figured cures and the list of symptoms too still seems vague to an extent. Our country has only tested 2,200 individuals. That's 0.0001% of the entire country's population. This is not anywhere close to an adequate sample to estimate the real magnitude of the issue underlying. Please try to focus on this type of real issues, despite your political leanings.

I think you can understand the psychological cost of staying at home in isolation for almost 2 weeks, with fear and uncertainty bearing the financial cost on top of all. What your media is doing is worsening all of this by your politically motivated xenophobic reports. The general public is watching you in disgust.

Request to the signers : 

Please join me in demanding the media outlets to stop the bigotry and join us in our united fight against COVID-19, and misuses of the cause. Wiki list given below is currently being compiled on the issue. This needs to updated with as many reports as possible so the legal actions against these media outlets can be much easier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:List_of_incidents_of_xenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sri_Lanka

Copied : 

Press Complaints Commission of Sri Lanka

Hon. Minister of Information and Mass Media