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.