Bad press

It takes extraordinary talent to be a democratic leader. The overwhelming temptations of power, wealth and glory are extraordinary and many ordinary men cannot resist them.

The test of this nation's first democratically elected leaders has not yet been passed. The day of reckoning remains distant.

But one thing this nation is quickly learning is that while a leader can be elected through a democratic process, he has little right to automatically claim himself a democrat.

The penchant for absolutism is innate within most humans and continues to flow through the veins of those who rise to power.

A system of checks and balances -- with key elements of that system being the legislature and the judiciary -- are put in place to prevent abuses of power.

More importantly, however, a modern democracy also relies on constitutional mechanisms and an informed populace, able to arrive at their own opinions, to hinder the natural fallibilities of all branches of government.

Hence the rise of the "fourth estate" -- the media -- as a daily monitor of the government.

Freedom of expression and freedom of the press have become as integral as free and fair elections in any democracy. The significance of these freedoms resonate in the words of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas -- a champion of liberal values -- who stated that "full and free discussion has indeed been the first article of our faith".

Since no human is infallible, free discussion -- through polemical arguments, discussion and debate in the press -- and the consensus of such open, public deliberation must be considered by elected leaders, to counter their personal biases, when making policy decisions.

On a daily basis, the press and policymakers are engaged in a perpetual battle over the view of reality that is presented to the people. It is an earnest contest, in which both sides hold in high esteem the idealism of the other.

It is a sad day when that very penchant of absolutism creates a desire to subvert the other's role.

We fear that those days of lament will soon be upon this nation.

Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed with increasing frequency how the nation's most senior leaders have responded to public criticism with a diatribe of their own.

During a teacher's congress, Vice President Jusuf Kalla denounced a senior professor for reading out a poem lamenting the state of national education and the government's neglect of teachers and schools.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, before announcing his Cabinet reshuffle, took great pains to rebuff television reports on the debate over the ministerial selections.

Decrees have also been issued to inhibit regular live news feeds from abroad.

On Wednesday, the vice president reproached the press for its "bad news reporting and criticism."

"Sometimes, one day (of bad news) is enough, not a whole week," he said in his address at the ceremony marking the 68th anniversary of Antara national news agency.

Kalla went on to lament media criticism of hunger in Papua, and had the audacity to cite the press in countries like China, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.

With all due respect to these four countries, has the vice president forgotten that the blood and tears shed during the reformasi upheavals were largely about creating a free political system -- unlike China, Malaysia and Singapore?

Is he also unable to comprehend that we would be going backward to the era of New Order authoritarianism if we let powerful individuals close to the government gain controlling shares in the largest media groups, as is the case in Thailand?

As people become more financially desperate and ignore weighty political virtues, there may be those who would whittle away the dignity of people in a subtle way.

Each step of the way may seem of little consequence, but in their entirety there suddenly emerges a force that can easily impose and intrude upon an individual's private rights.

We can only hope that these incidents are isolated lapses in judgment, and not indicative of a future trend.

To quote French philosopher Albert Camus: "A free press can be good or bad. But, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad".