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.