Journalists warned of misreporting drug cases
Journalists warned of misreporting drug cases
JAKARTA (JP): Journalists must be more careful when reporting illegal drug cases because incorrect reports might promote drug abuse, Southeast Asian drug experts and officials said.
They said media reporting of the region's drug cases often tended to be quite sensational.
The experts and officials were speaking on the first day of a week-long course for ASEAN journalists on illegal drugs, here yesterday.
Cho Kah Sin from the ASEAN secretariat office cited several local reports of celebrities arrested on charges of possessing and trafficking drugs.
The reports "are glamorizing the issues," said Cho, assistant director of Functional Cooperation Bureau of ASEAN secretariat overseeing methods on drugs and related matters.
The course is an ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information (COCI) project.
A Malaysian delegate, Information Officer Ashari Manis, said the press should not report the estimated value of drugs police confiscated.
He was referring to a copy of a Manila-based newspaper a Philippine official showed participants. It had a story with a provocative headline explaining the estimated value of drugs police had seized.
Manis said publishing drugs' value might not help global campaigns to reduce drug abuse in the region.
On the contrary, such a report might prompt people, like the poor, to enter the high-profit business whatever the risks.
Sharing Manis' view, host expert Brig. Gen. (ret.) Tony Sidharta said such reports, including those explaining the "positive" sides of drug consumption, could encourage youths to try dangerous drugs.
The community sincerely expects the mass media to report the right and exact information instrumental in reducing drug abuse, he said.
"In this context the mass media and their reporters need to be mature and this reflected in the reports," Tony said.
Eleven senior ASEAN officials and drug experts and 33 reporters from the seven ASEAN countries: Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, attended the course.
The main subjects discussed were: the steps taken by the ASEAN countries to control drug abuse and its impact, the role of journalists in reducing drug abuse and the need for professional guidelines on disseminating correct and accurate information about the danger of illegal drugs.
The meeting, opened by Asep Saefudin on behalf of Dewabrata, chairman of ASEAN-Coci for Indonesia's branch office, has a theme of ASEAN Journalists supporting a global commitment to a drug- free ASEAN.
In his speech read by Saefudin, Dewabrata quoted UNDCP figures which show Indonesia has the region's third highest number of drug addicts.
First is the Philippines with 334,500 , then Vietnam with 180,000 addicts, and Indonesia with 120,000 addicts, he said.
Thailand has 88,593 addicts, Malaysia 24,023, Singapore 4,713 and Brunei 595, he said.
But local experts and reporters said the actual number of addicts was higher.
"Our figures show there are about a million drug addicts in the Philippines," said the president of Quezon City-based Foundation for Drug Information and Communication.
Brunei delegates said the number of drug addicts in their country was about 3,000. (bsr)