Minister turned off by gory TV programs
JAKARTA (JP): Private television stations were reminded yesterday of their role as a medium to foster unity and educate the public, and were told not to dramatize news reports with graphic footage.
During a meeting with representatives of the five private television stations in his office yesterday, Minister of Information Muhammad Alwi Dahlan said television touched a large segment of society and that stations had an important role in lifting public awareness and understanding of important issues.
He said news and feature stories should be reported with the aim of unifying the people.
He also called on television stations not to dramatize news reports to increase ratings.
The representatives from RCTI, SCTV, ANteve, TPI and Indosiar were reporting to the minister on preparations for an upcoming television series, or sinetron, festival.
The National Institute of Sciences (LIPI) yesterday slammed television news reporting for its vulgar content when it announced the results of a study on the subject.
Communications expert Rusdi Muchtar said the study concluded that graphic footage was still prevalent in many news reports.
"Such vulgarity is evident in television (news reports), such as showing the scene of a homicide in detail. One can even sometimes see blood and part of a corpse," he said as quoted by Antara.
He expressed concern over the psychological effects such scenes could have on children.
While acknowledging that there is some debate over how television directly influences societal behavior, Rusdi said the institute's research in four cities -- Medan in North Sumatra, Ujungpandang in South Sulawesi and Bekasi and Bogor in West Java -- found a positive correlation between viewing action films and the level of crime.
If violent action films are linked with the graphic scenes shown in crime reports, viewers, especially young ones, could perceive real life violence as an affirmation of the violent scenes they see in movies, Rusdi said.
"Maybe for adults the scenes in action films and criminal television reports are quite normal and have little influence. But for children and teenagers, the fiction they see in films and the violence they see in TV crime news unite as a single reality," he said.
He urged strong evaluation of visual content in crime news reports, saying that news could be accurately reported without graphic film clips.
"The viewer should be able to understand and appreciate the full content of the news without the station having to exploit the scene or victim of the crime," he said.
"For that purpose we need to study more about presenting pictures so that scenes in crime news reports do not ignore ethics." (mds)