Media's role in direct elections

Media's role in direct elections

A'an Suryana, Jakarta

Several regions have started direct regional elections and more
elections to vote for local leaders will follow in the coming
weeks. The direct elections this year, the first in Indonesian
history, will be held in over 200 mayoralties, regencies and
provinces across the nation.

The elections have been widely covered by the media, and the
coverage has been praised by various quarters for helping broaden
people's minds on the elections, providing them with political
education and helping defuse potential conflicts in this diverse
archipelago.

However, in general, media coverage has not lived up to public
expectations.

During recent regional elections, many media enterprises did
not uphold the principle of impartiality in covering the
elections. In many cases, the media supported certain candidates
running for public office.

The support was generally divided into two categories,
institutional support and individual support.

In the first category, media leaders and owners of newspapers,
radio and television stations persuaded and encouraged
journalists to support certain candidates. If the journalists did
not comply, their job was at stake. A case in point here was in
Yogyakarta where a member of the Election Supervisory Committee
(Panwaslu) reported that a local newspaper never reported
violations committed by a pair of candidate running for regent
and deputy regent. This type of case has been common in the
country.

In the second category, several journalists quietly supported
certain candidates running for public office without the
endorsement of their employers. They built relationships with the
candidates and signed a deal that they would support the
candidates, and in return, they would be paid or given a position
in the new government. The journalists generally helped the
candidates in shaping coverage that would benefit the candidates
in question, by providing them input on public relations or
writing stories or articles that benefited the candidates.

These two forms of support have been commonplace in local
media and these have made journalistic independence hard to
achieve. Even before the regional elections kicked off in Kutai
Kartanegara, East Kalimantan on June 1, many media and
journalists had already become dependent on local government
officials in the form of ads and subscriptions.

It is no longer a secret that local media enterprises, which
need money to survive, rely on government subscriptions and ads
placed in publications or electronic media by local governments.
In East Kalimantan, for example, a chief editor-cum-publisher
marketed her magazine to government officials to encourage the
administration to buy her magazine and put ads in it.

Even more dangerous is the fact that some local media
enterprises are owned by local politicians. In this case, public
cannot expect them to be credible and independent.

Besides being criticized for being bias and partial, the media
has also been condemned for not providing balanced coverage
during the first regional elections. Whether it is deliberate or
not, but the media tends to cover the incumbent leaders or
celebrities as what the establishments have done or said is
always newsworthy. In the legislative elections last year,
several studies have found that the Golkar Party and the
Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the two largest
parties in the country, obtained much more coverage than other
parties, especially smaller parties.

This pattern has repeated itself in the direct regional
elections. During the regional elections, local media has
provided much more coverage on incumbent regents and mayors at
the expense of new entrants. As a result, some incumbents have
benefited from the wide coverage and have been reelected, as was
the case in Kutai Kartanegara regency and Kebumen regency in
Central Java.

Kompas newspaper has provided an example of balanced reporting
in its coverage of elections. During the national legislative
elections and direct presidential election last year, the
newspaper provided equal coverage of political parties and
presidential candidates. During the campaign, the leading
newspaper allocated front page space and published the campaign
promises of political parties and presidential candidates with
the same size of stories, regardless of whether they were small
or big parties, popular or little-known presidential candidates.

The newsworthiness was certainly questionable, but editors at
Kompas might have thought that balanced reporting was much more
important than whether or not a story would attract its readers.
Whether it was a correct choice or not from a journalistic
perspective is still debatable, but Kompas has demonstrated that
balanced reporting is important for political education.

What aspects must the media develop as further regional
elections are drawing near? Learning from what happened during
the initial local elections, the media should provide balanced
reporting. Instead of providing coverage on some current leaders,
it should provide room for alternative choices such as new
candidates.

The media should also enlighten and broaden the public's
knowledge by providing them with more stories on the proposed
programs of candidates, rather than blow up stories on potential
conflicts and the struggle for power.

There is nothing wrong with focusing on the struggle for
power, but there are several other aspects that are interesting
to develop in order to broaden people's minds. Instead of running
stories on who got what, the media should provide the candidates
and elected leaders with demands for appropriate policies for the
community and public at large.

Sadly, stories or articles that provide a critical point of
view on policies that would bring benefit to the people rarely
appear in the media, especially in regional media.

The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post. The article
will be presented during a seminar on media in Ulaanbaatar,
Mongolia on June 27 and June 28, held by the Press Institute of
Mongolia and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Asia Regional
Representative.