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.