JP/18/PILKD2

JP/18/PILKD2

The blazing war for attention

Perfectly aware that people have very short attention spans, Denpasar politicians exploited every available means of communication to ensure they had the people's undivided attention during the recently concluded election campaign.

This led to spectacles such as two young and sexy dangdut singers, Rema Ashari and Rina Iswara, up on stage dancing and crooning to an appreciative crowd of men, stopping occasionally to remind them to vote for Widiada and his running mate Suma Widana in the Denpasar mayoral election on June 24.

"Remember to vote for Widiada-Suma Widana in the election. They are good, honest and, most importantly, deadly handsome," Rema purred.

The audience went mad, dancing wildly around the girls and screaming their wholehearted support for the candidates.

Nobody paid attention to some small details, such as that both Rema and Rina were residents of Banyuwangi, East Java, and were not registered voters in Denpasar.

More importantly, honestly speaking, they were not supporters of Widiada and Suma Widana, or any other candidates for that matter.

They were just attractive dangdut singers, a tool to capture voters' attention.

"Using dangdut singers is a proven method for attracting crowds of people. That is why they have become an integral part of every major political gathering in the country," political analyst Bhaskara said.

Dangdut singers were just one of a large number of tools exploited by candidates to garner public support.

Every candidate had his or her own PR team, often including journalists and photographers from various local media outlets. These teams manufactured and manicured the candidates' images through a well-detailed media strategy and prolonged media exposure.

Fearing the involvement of their journalists and photographers with candidates' campaign teams could compromise their neutrality, several local newspapers imposed a strict policy on campaign reporting, which included treating all campaign news as advertorials, ranging in price from Rp 1 million to Rp 2.5 million for a 500-word article.

"This scheme ensures that the money goes to the company and not to the journalists. By doing so, we hope that no candidate will receive favorable, biased treatment due to his 'friendship' with influential journalists. In short, we will print news on any candidate provided he can pay for it," a media executive said.

History will judge whether this policy helped protect the integrity of the media.

One thing, however, is already certain; the policy sparked a fierce competition among candidates and newspaper were transformed into virtual campaign leaflets.

"Newspapers became a dull, boring medium. The content of the campaign coverage cast a similarly positive light on all of the candidates because they paid for it," one disgruntled reader said.

A fierce competition was also waged over the airwaves of TV and radio stations. The big winner was definitely BaliTV, the most popular television station on the island and the media of choice for candidates.

"Puspayoga spent about Rp 75 million for television ads while Widiada spent nearly Rp 60 million. In addition, the candidates for Badung regent poured nearly Rp 1 billion into the station for ads," a source said.

This is an outrageous sum of money, particularly since the ads were generally of poor quality, both visually and contentwise.

Interestingly, all this money and effort seems to have done little to sway the majority of registered voters in Denpasar.

"I could not even tell one candidate's ads from another. They all looked the same to me," one registered voter said.