Reflection on National Broadcasting Day: Child-Friendly Broadcasting and a Home for Children
Not long ago, the government’s issuance of Government Regulation No. 17 of 2025 on the Governance of Electronic Systems in Child Protection (PP TUNAS) came just days before the commemoration of National Broadcasting Day (HARSIARNAS). These two events undoubtedly provide momentum for improving the quality of information, particularly in creating a child-friendly digital space.
Every 1 April, Indonesian society celebrates HARSIARNAS to preserve the historical legacy of the establishment of the first radio by Mangkunegoro VII, named Solosche Radio Vereniging (SRV). The introduction of PP TUNAS is a response to digital phenomena deemed insufficiently child-friendly.
Numerous studies have warned that social media does not always have positive impacts. It leaves steep gaps for children. Not just because of the content, but crucially, children are not yet capable of critically digesting the abstract information circulating on social media, especially content devoid of value.
This inadequacy in capability can be understood as the fundamental reason for protection efforts. Considering that social media and other new media do not arrive bearing only nobility. As shown in recent cases in the United States regarding platforms creating addictive spaces without warnings to consumers.
In those cases, Meta and Google were found guilty of indications of making children addicted to social media. This addiction should not be seen merely as a phenomenon of children’s fondness for social media, but rather as something designed to render children powerless before it. In this context, consumer protection regulations are deemed important.
Protecting from Home
The government’s boldness in ‘isolating’ children under 16 years old is a step worthy of appreciation, although it requires further action. Of course, it necessitates a massive and equitable digital literacy movement so that society, especially children, can be more critical in filtering information.
Furthermore, the role of the family must not fade. The author recalls what KH Wahab Hasbullah stated (KH. Wahab Hasbullah in the Eyes of the Family, 2025), that one day television would no longer need antennas or cables to receive broadcasts. Likewise with handphones, which would be free from the cables that often bother us.
The imagination of one of the pioneers of media in the NU body has indeed become a reflection; not limited to the devices, but also affecting consumption patterns.
As a past experience from childhood, we rarely accessed information without family accompaniment. In the family room where the television was mounted on the wall of our home, there was interaction within it that created a warm atmosphere of mutual mitigation.
Children were not left alone to digest information. The family stood as an information network, providing additional information or even correcting information deemed unsuitable for children.
Now the symptoms are different. Parents may also be among the subjects who are ‘powerless’ amid the octopus of social media information. Thus, we often witness that when children are watching television or engrossed in their handphones, it is the same with parents who accompany them.
The greater challenge is how to turn this child protection step into a collective will. Not relying solely on the government. So that we can together monitor both the exposure of information to children and the implementation of the regulation.
More Than Just Friendly
Amid such behavioural changes, HARSIARNAS becomes a medium that never grows stale amid challenges in technology and information. If in the past it supported patriotism, now television and radio must inevitably have their functions contextualised.
The 2025 Survey of TV Broadcast Programme Quality Index (IKPSTV) records that children’s programmes have met standards. They achieved an index of 3.41, followed by news programmes (3.37), infotainment (2.68), religious programmes (3.82), soap operas (3.05), talk shows (3.36), variety shows (3.09), and cultural tourism programmes (3.47).
With this data, television can be said to be a sufficiently child-friendly space. Thus, in my view, television and radio are instruments of information worthy of being made a home for children, especially in accessing information for their growth and development. Moreover, television and radio are the only instruments monitored in real-time 24 hours by the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI).
Finally, the regulation of children’s access to social media through PP TUNAS and the commemoration of HARSIARNAS must be used as momentum by television and radio to provide quality broadcast programmes for children, whether programmes directly related to children or other programmes still within the ‘duration’ when children are actively watching and listening to television and radio.