The press yet to be free of its audience

The press yet to be free of its audience

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE (JP): Issues concerning the media in Indonesia and
Australia were brought to the fore when Goenawan Mohamad, a
respected poet, essayist and former editor-in-chief of Tempo
newsmagazine, was invited to give the Walkleys media lecture in
Melbourne earlier this month. The Walkley Awards, established in
1956 and now sponsored by a number of foundations and corporate
bodies, such as Asialink, American Express International,
Macquarie Dictionary, Malaysia Airlines, Myer Foundation,
Australian Broadcasting Corporations, Australian Bureau of
Statistics and Ozemail, are given in recognition of excellence in
Australian journalism.

In his lecture, Goenawan pointed to a study by the Jakarta-
based Institute for the Study of the Free Flow of Information
(ISAI), which he founded. ISAI's study revealed biases on the
part of both Indonesian and Australian media in their reporting
of the East Timor conflict.

While the Indonesian media studied by ISAI mainly relied on
officials, politicians and non-governmental organization
activists for information, the Australian media, like many other
foreign media, gave considerably more space to the views of pro-
East Timor independence UN spokespersons and Western government
and military leaders. The Sydney Morning Herald, a widely
respected mainstream publication in Australia, according to the
study, on three occasions compared the loss of lives in East
Timor to the extermination of Jews by the Nazis.

"Comparing the tragedy of the East Timorese with six million
Jews exterminated in the holocaust is misleading hyperbole," said
Goenawan.

It appears that while most of the Indonesian media failed to
investigate the Indonesian Military's involvement in the post-
referendum savagery, the Australian media tended to blow already
atrocious situations out of proportion, heaping the blame
indiscriminately on Indonesia.

Interestingly, in Indonesia, in this post-New Order era of
media freedom, the issue of accuracy of information has shifted
from being continuously alert in performing a creative pas de
deux with Big Brother, to maintaining equanimity on the part of
journalists and editors when covering highly sensitive and rage-
provoking events.

Goenawan observes that, in relation to reporting on East
Timor, the Indonesian media still had a problem in dealing with
their collective sense of guilt and embarrassment on behalf of
its country.

Supposing this is true, with the additional pressure of
continuous outside attacks on their national pride, they
obviously became defensive, even bordering on counteroffensive.

Here we are faced with an interesting thought; can the media
be completely independent from the moods and sentiments prevalent
in the community? Goenawan believes that a newspaper is never
simply a creation of its editor and publisher. It is also a
creature of its own audience.

This might explain the tendency of the Australian media to
direct their anger at Indonesia, as well as apportion blame on
the country, in relation to East Timor. Among Australians, East
Timor's struggle for independence from Indonesia assumed the
biblical dimensions of the contest between David and Goliath.

And most Australians still hang on to the ethos of defending
the underdog. In the early 1940s for example, they took
Indonesia's side against the Dutch.

A dilemma then presents itself; how far can the media be
detached from the prevailing values in the community? Can a
journalist safely walk the tightrope balancing the truth on one
side and personal and collective outrage on the other?

Goenawan quoted a veteran British journalist who told him: "In
stories about war and cruelty, when our passion for justice tips
the scale, often truth is the first casualty."

This problem is made even more serious in an era where the
reach, the speed and the quantity of information are increasingly
bedazzling. "The ideal reader," said Goenawan, "has become an
elusive concept. You write a story and the publisher puts it
online, and you are no longer sure who will read you, in which
part of the world, and at what time of the day."

This puts additional responsibility on journalists, who
ideally have to keep in mind what the reader already knows and
what the reader is unaware of, because a particular story written
in a particular manner would have a different impact on readers
with different degrees of existing knowledge.

Goenawan's lecture did not give a recipe for the perfect
journalistic piece, but did provide food for thought, if the
number and nature of questions asked afterward could be used as a
gauge.

The writer is a free-lance journalist based in Melbourne.