The Easter Sunday attacks in April 2019 ravaged Sri Lanka with terror. The Sri Lankan government and the media focused on the transnational terrorist support for the attacks; the issue of local unrest between the Sinhalese and the Muslim communities was largely ignored. 

The lack of reliable, structured, and accessible data to academic and public institutions, media organisations, and the general public compounded the issue. Such failures enabled the spread of negative, discriminatory campaigns by Buddhist extremists that deepened the fear and heightened the mistrust within the Muslim community.  

In mid-2020, UNDP reached out to several civil society organisations in Sri Lanka to develop effective and innovative tools and methods that aim to reduce the vulnerability of Sri Lankan communities towards violent extremism. The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) stepped in to address and curtail the spread of conflict-inducing reporting in the media.  

Sri Lanka's media technology was up-to-date, but its media literacy among media practitioners and content creators is one of the lowest in the South Asian region. In addition, journalistic accountability and integrity have fallen by the wayside. These were the challenges faced by the CIR.

CIR engages journalists and social media influencers to take a deeper look at issues, produce inquiry-based reports, and avoid amplifying rhetoric and systematic propaganda. The CIR initiative to empower journalists, visual storytellers, bloggers, citizen journalists, media educators, and interested citizens used investigative journalism as its tool; the initiative created awareness on the best practices of journalism, and its higher purpose, thereby aiding to halt the spread of hate messaging and propaganda. 

The CIR projects, the first of their kind to be implemented in Sri Lanka, began on the 30th of November 2020 and used a three-pronged approach. These interventions were a part of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Regional Project on ‘Preventing Violent Extremism through promoting tolerance and respect for diversity’ funded by the European Union.

The first activity was the Media Literacy Foundations Program, under which 18 training sessions were conducted for 300 journalists, media academics, civic groups, citizen journalists, and non-journalists who were made aware of the aspects and importance of media literacy and its need as a professional requirement.

CIR's second stage was the Investigative Journalism Foundations Initiative. This initiative was a collaboration with local and international experts on the subject. Here, a selected group of senior journalists learned the fundamentals of investigative journalism and they in turn are now serving as resource persons for young journalists. 

The third stage consisted of Accountability Journalism, and Alternate Narratives that took a novel approach by focusing on evidence-based creative storytelling. Using visual storytelling and creating compelling narratives through citizen journalism, the program attracted 200 plus young people who were not traditional journalists. Through this, they curated stories from far-flung places that record tales of inclusion and diversity.  

The outcome of these initiatives by the Center for Investigative Reporting is building the capacity of media personnel and others to produce unbiased and balanced narratives to counter the current hate messaging and propaganda.