KPU urges media to be professional
Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The General Elections Commission (KPU), the Election Supervisory Committee and the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) are drafting election campaign guidelines to govern coverage on radio and television, which will set limitations on the length of the advertising slots allocated to candidates.
KPU member Hamid Awaluddin said on Tuesday that the guidelines would not allow party or Regional Representatives Council (DPD) candidates to book more than 10 slots of 30 seconds duration during each day of the campaign. This was in line with KPU Instruction No. 701/2004 on the election campaign, he said.
Election candidates would also be banned from buying slots. If this was not the case, it was feared that the big parties with huge financial resources would gain an unfair advantage.
"These guidelines will provide the Election Supervisory Committee with yardsticks for conducting monitoring during the campaign," Hamid told a press conference after a meeting of members of KPU, the supervisory committee, the KPI and representatives of non-governmental organizations.
The discussions on the drafting of the guidelines would start on Thursday.
The KPU instruction stipulates that parties and DPD candidates will only be allocated a maximum of 10 spots on radio with a duration of 60 seconds per spot, and are prohibited from using slots allotted to other candidates for whatever reason.
Hamid said the guidelines would also require all TV and radio stations to announce publicly their advertising rates for the election campaign and the payment procedures.
Meanwhile, KPI chairman Victor Menayang said the planned guidelines would protect radio and television stations from pressure from the political parties, provide parties with equal opportunities to air advertisements, and ensure that the public received high quality information.
He said that those broadcasters who violated the guidelines would be punished.
"The violators will receive punishments ranging from reprimands to being ordered to stop airing news as provided for in the Broadcasting Law," he said.
Supervisory committee chairman Komaruddin Hidayat had something else to say, however.
"There will be no punishments. These guidelines are not regulations but rather suggestions," he said.
The KPU instruction on the election campaign says nothing about sanctions.
Victor also said it would be difficult to regulate the editorial policy of media outlets in covering the election as this would greatly depend on the outlets themselves.
"We have to admit that for some media outlets certain parties are newsmakers while others are not," he said.
A senior executive of the Media Election Coalition, Indra J. Piliang, hailed the plan to draft campaign guidelines for the media, saying it would make it easier for his organization to monitor the campaign, particularly in the electronic media.