Only facts can make truth

Two years ago, a letter writer to The Jakarta Post stated her view that journalism, like the law, was a great bastion of truth. Another reader (who I happen to know) disagreed with her.

Regarding the law, we all read what happened in the OJ Simpson murder trials, where the first court of law acquitted him, while a second court found him guilty. We also have heard of cases where people who have been convicted and incarcerated for years were later set free, as new evidence emerged that they were innocent all along.

Journalism is at its best when it is balanced and all the facts are reported accurately. It is at its worst when one-sided and subjective individual opinions are presented to readers as the truth.

It does not matter if the news source has a global reputation; big corporations can and do make big mistakes.

In the Post, last May 8, I suggested that TV viewers should not become wholly dependent on CNN. A mere two months later, CNN has embarrassingly admitted that a sensational report they recently aired about nerve gas being used to kill defectors during the Indochina war was inaccurate. To a worldwide audience, the network had to retract its news "scoop". Two producers were fired, and veteran correspondent Peter Arnett's reputation has been tarnished. More heads may roll at CNN.

In 1996, Time magazine apologized and was forced to pay US$262,000 in damages, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars more in legal fees, to a man they reported had been on the payroll of the Soviet KGB. The man later said of the world's top newsmagazine: "Those guys deliberately invented facts, distorted quotes and suppressed all the information that didn't fit their needs."

After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, a widely circulated British tabloid ran a large photo of the devastated Alfred P. Murrah building on its front page with a headline screaming: All in the name of Islam, without first checking the facts. The actual perpetrators were found to be right-wing militia members, all of them non-Moslem Americans. But how much prejudice against Islam had already been generated among the millions of readers upon seeing that front page?

In 1983 German magazine Stern dramatically announced the discovery of Hitler's secret diaries and proceeded to publish the manuscript in installments. Britain's Sunday Times agreed to pay $400,000 for the Commonwealth rights. Newsweek devoted a cover story to the diaries' contents and trumpeted it in a series of advertisements. After the banned volumes were proven to be forgeries, several top Stern editors had to resign, and there were red faces at the other publications.

My point is that as news consumers we need to be critical, and not simply believe everything that we view and read. After all, the reporters and editors behind the news stories are also human, and are prone to human errors. The Post acknowledged publishing an erroneous report recently and in gentlemanly fashion retracted the front-page story.

One big danger is that in the future, the international press will be in the hands of just a few powerful, giant media corporations and diversity of views may be lost. I am reminded of a scene in the last 007 movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, where the media baron, Elliot Carver, says to James Bond: "I want power! The power to inform!"

Information alone does not necessarily equate truth. Only facts can make the truth.

FARID BASKORO

Jakarta