Indonesia needs to learn from U.S. mass media

Indonesia needs to learn from U.S. mass media

Ardimas Sasdi, Staff Writer, The Jakarta Post, Berkeley, California
ajambak@calmail.berkeley.edu

Worried at its negative image with the public, which viewed
the press as failing to defend the truth and meekly toeing the
government line, executives of the U.S. media, journalists and
university professors gathered here last week for a soul-
searching seminar.

The three-day seminar at the University of California,
Berkeley, was part of a series of events organized by like-minded
American scholars and institutions concerned at the flagrant
infringement of freedom of the press and of expression by the
authorities since the U.S. government launched a war on terrorism
three years ago.

The core theme of the meeting, which featured former chief UN
weapons inspector Hans Blix, was coverage by the U.S. media of
the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, but the talks
covered wide-ranging issues from politics to military affairs,
the freedom of journalists to do their work and the media
business. These factors all determine how journalists are able to
function.

Washington's stringent policy on access to information has put
journalists in an awkward position. On the one hand journalists
must listen to editors, who enforce editorial policy as dictated
by media owners preoccupied with profit and good ties with the
government, while on the other they have to meet the demand of
the reading and viewing public for objective and accurate
reports.

Some participants of the seminar were extremely cynical of the
U.S. media, saying that the press had failed to intelligently
inform the American public by being insufficiently critical of
the reasons President George W. Bush's administration went to war
in Iraq.

The critics said that with immense power in its hands the
media did not make any serious attempt to challenge false claims
by Washington that linked the Iraqi regime to the Sept. 11
attacks, or that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. because
it had weapons of mass destruction. Neither claim has been proven
until now.

Without ignoring the spirit of patriotism and the necessity to
defend the national interest by U.S. journalists, senior
correspondent of Italian daily La Republica Frederico Rampini
said coverage by the American media on the U.S. invasion of Iraq
was "terrible".

Journalism professor and Los Angeles Times columnist Bob
Scheer said, in a stinging statement in front of a strongly
antiwar audience, "This has been a most shameful era for the
American media. The media has been sucker-punched completely by
this administration."

Blix said that the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq was "war
by choice, not necessity". But some U.S. journalists, many of
them media executives, defended their positions, arguing that it
was the best journalists could do at the time, with limited
access to information and intelligence, and that it was unfair to
hold the media responsible for every ill that occurred in the
country.

Retro Poll, an advocacy group, suggested that the U.S. media
had failed to get things right due to complicity between media
owners and the government in a campaign of deception and
misinformation on the Iraq war. Retro Poll called on journalists
to unite and act collectively with other like-minded
organizations for legal action and to act in defiance of
corporate demands that they lie down and roll over.

The widespread view that the U.S. media was biased forced
educated and politically literate Americans to seek information
from other sources they regarded as reliable. One UC Berkeley
professor, for example, said that from the start she surfed the
Internet to seek information on the Iraq war.

The experience of the U.S. media and American public since the
Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon is not only an
interesting phenomenon in an advanced democracy, but also a
valuable lesson for countries in other parts of the world,
particularly a nascent democracy like Indonesia.

The freedom of the press and of expression enjoyed by
Indonesia since 1998 after the resignation of former President
Soeharto, who ruled the country with an iron fist for 32 years,
is fragile, as nondemocratic forces and government opposition to
a free press are ever-present hazards.

The situation was exacerbated by an inclination by media
owners to side with the government for favor or other personal
motives. Journalists have also turned their backs on aspects of
the code of ethics such as impartiality by becoming executives of
political parties but still retaining their positions in the
media.

These worrisome developments have occurred amid a rapid pace
of media conglomeration. The Alliance of Independence Journalists
has highlighted in its annual reports in the last few years the
dangers of concentration of media ownership in a small group of
firms that control 600 print media, about 20 television firms and
1,200 radio stations in the country.

The group includes 20 firms that are part of corporations or
media giants. The businesses of these groups cover paper plants,
printing firms, bookstores, banks, leasing companies and real
estate. Two of the media giants -- the Kompas group and Tempo-
Jawa Pos groups -- have a combined circulation of more than 40
percent of the total for magazines, newspapers and tabloids, and
a substantial market share in electronic media and news portals.

These large groups, thanks to the government's policy to
liberalize the media industry in 1999, continued to expand their
networks by publishing new titles of newspapers, magazines and
tabloids, as well as establishing TV and radio stations in areas
across the country. Some of this business expansion was in the
form of cross-ownership, a practice strictly regulated in other
countries to prevent concentration of control over information.

U.S. experience of the media and powerholders in alleged
complicity at the expense of democracy should serve as a lesson
for Indonesia. The business of media giants should be regulated
so that it will not further marginalize the small, more objective
media as an alternative source of information. This is essential
as a mechanism of democratic control, but it has not yet been
established.

The writer is a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of
Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley.