Press urged to prioritized vital national interests
Press urged to prioritized vital national interests
Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Media observers voiced concern on Friday about the tendency
for the media to misuse its new-found freedom to sensationalize
stories in order to boost its readership.
They said that the media ought to have focused on issues of
national importance that would help produce an atmosphere
conducive for Indonesia to regain the strength to recover from
the economic crisis.
Some media, they noted, took a provocative stand and helped
fan communal conflicts in the provinces and anti-American
sentiments in the ongoing U.S.-Afghan war.
"Provocative reporting will only worsen a conflict," said Ade
Armando, director of the Media Watch and Consumer Center.
Some media failed to cover both sides in the event of
conflict, he said.
The local media has come under public scrutiny since it
rediscovered its freedom following the fall of authoritarian
president Soeharto.
"The media should uphold the principle of covering both sides
and focusing its messages on solutions to conflict," Ade told The
Jakarta Post.
Veven S. P. Wardhana, coordinator of the Media Watch section
of the Institute for the Study of Free Flow of Information,
concurred with Ade's views, saying some newspapers had turned to
sensationalism to sell more copies.
"We often see newspapers splash provocative headlines that are
merely quotes from people in the street. The headlines are
usually unrepresentative of the content of the story," Veven
said.
The problem, he said, was that people generally enjoyed
reading provocative and sensational reports.
Veven observed that the lack of balanced reporting was common,
not only in small publications but also in the well-established
ones.
"These sensational and provocative newspapers have given the
mass media as a whole a bad name when it comes to the question of
what it has contributed to the economic recovery effort," Ade
said.
Veven also had a point of criticism about the media. It
devoted too much space to official propaganda and too little to
investigative reporting.
Commenting on criticism that the press had not made any
significant contribution to the economic and political recovery
effort,Ade stressed that creating a positive atmosphere was not
the media's job.
"The function of the mass media in general is to portray the
actual situation, good or bad, so that people can make up their
own mind about how to respond to it," Ade said.
"If the mass media is forced to fabricate optimistic stories
that do not portray the reality, it means that we will have
returned to the restrictions of the Soeharto era," he added.
Chairman of the Indonesian Press Council Atmakusumah
Astraatmadja said that for similar reasons the media could not be
blamed for the painstakingly slow progress in the economic
recovery.
"The press cannot be blamed for economic difficulties such as
a bearish stock market or the weakening of the rupiah. It is the
media's job to report the situation," Atmakusumah said.