ABSTRACT
Viewers in Sri Lanka have been left confused and confounded by what is being offered by newscasts on mainstream TV channels. They see news bulletins leaving out facts that go against the political and market agenda of the owners of the stations, exaggeration and over-reporting of facts that are favoured by the channels and even distortions of news items owing to unethical editing. This has resulted in the news consumers being unable to tell fact from fiction. The lack of regulations governing electronic media and a code of conduct common to all television channels has resulted in the current situation where the TV channels are able to create their own version of news and events and maintain a hegemonic over the content to serve their own agendas. This chapter exposes relationship between television channel owners and audience, television coverage in the last months of the war, recent elections, the Easter Sunday attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic and the TV news environment that has developed as a post-truth reality in the television landscape in Sri Lanka.
