When the media helps and when it does not

When the media helps and when it does not

Ivan A. Hadar, President Indonesian Institute for Democracy
Education (IDe), Jakarta

Last year, two dates punctuated a continuing cycle of violence
and counter-violence: Sept. 11 in the United States, and the Oct.
7 start of the attack on Afghanistan. The recent "Bali bomb" has
affected Indonesia in many dimensions. What is the role of media
in continuing or in breaking out of this vicious cycle?

Some days after Sept. 11, a psychologist gave advice on CNN to
parents with children asking difficult questions. A young boy had
asked "What have we done to make them hate us so much that they
do such things?" A mature question, unlike the answer: "You could
tell your child that there are good people in the world, and
evil."

That boy had arrived at the stage of reciprocity on
psychologist Jean Piaget's scale of child development, seeing the
actions of others at least partly as influenced by our own
actions (and vice versa). Yet the psychologist's answer remained
at the early stage of autism, seeing evil actions by others as
uninfluenced by anything we do -- as written by Johan Galtung and
D. Friedrich in their book this year. You might hear similar
answers to such questions everywhere. I heard it not only here,
especially from the fundamentalist corner.

Fundamentalism, not only in Islam, and puritanism as the civic
religion of the United States, share some common characteristics:
Dualism, dividing the world into us and them, without neutrals --
we are good, they are evil; and the inevitability of a final
decisive battle to "crush" them, like Armageddon.

A pamphlet last year in North Maluku, found after the attack
in New York and Washington, declared Christianization as a
religion which "endangers the Muslim community" and "paints Islam
as the religion of terrorists." The pamphlet explains much about
using religious sentiment of the folk for political ends.

Both use the media as weapons: In war, said Napoleon, the
moral element and public relations are half the battle. Both
sides use the media as a weapon.

Since early 1999, thousands of people have died in Maluku, in
what seems to be a religious war between Christians and Muslims.
Over 100,000 have become internally displaced persons. In October
1999, at the peak of the conflict in Ambon, a similar conflict
erupted in Halmahera, North Maluku.

The conflict then spread to Ternate, early in November. Dozens
died when Muslims went on a rampage after, they believed, their
religion was insulted. Three days earlier the same had happened
in Tidore. More than 10,000 Christians and ethnic Chinese fled to
Manado in North Sulawesi. Since then, fighting has spread to
villages in north and south Halmahera.

The conflict was triggered by a pamphlet distributed in
Ternate and Tidore that called on Christians to rise up in holy
war against Muslims. It urged Christians to convert "ignorant"
Muslims. Little wonder people in Tidore were provoked. Very
likely the unsigned pamphlet was actually a ploy by militants
wising to provoke violence.

With fighting in Ambon, no church leader would want another
conflict elsewhere. North Maluku is mostly Muslim, and a move
like that would only make Christians easy targets.

Bashy Quraisy, chief editor of Media Watch of the Danish
migrants organization Fair Play, has investigated the Western
media after Sept. 11. His conclusion: "In the press and Internet
media material that I went through from different countries
between Sept. 11 and Oct. 12, 2001, most of the Western media
used texts, pictures and terminology which did paint Islam as
barbaric, fanatical and uncivilized.

"Recently I also made a survey of Danish media coverage of
religions in Denmark. From May 15 to Aug. 15, six national
newspapers and two national TV channels were researched; 75
percent of media coverage was about Islam and nearly 60 percent
of the material were negative."

This uncritical journalism and intentional use of anti-Islam
terminology as a tool of propaganda unfortunately had immediate
side effects. International terrorism became synonymous with
Islam as a religion, Muslims as its followers as its co-
habitants.

Attacks on Arab and Asian-looking people have resulted in many
deaths of innocent people in various countries; vandalism and
looting of property, fire bombing of homes, harassment of jilbab-
wearing women and girls on the streets, children in the schools
and boycotts of co-workers. Alarm bells started ringing in the
halls of Western power bases. President George W. Bush appeared
in a mosque in Washington D.C and appealed to Americans to show
decency and restraint. He even said that Islam is a religion of
peace.

These very commendable gestures did lessen the tension.

Unfortunately, after the Bali tragedy of Oct. 12, many Western
political leaders are talking about fundamentalist Islam and
terrorism as the main enemy -- in the same breath. The common
person in the West may have a hard time distinguishing between
fundamentalism and fanaticism. These Western leaders seem unaware
that the mere mention of the word fundamentalism might evoke
anger among some segments of their populations, which in turn is
sometimes quickly and automatically projected on to Islam.

The role and power of the media in a modern society is
awesome. Once an information -- right or wrong, manufactured or
factual -- goes out to the public, it creates its own rhythm. One
can retreat, amend or correct it but you cannot nullify it. A
word, spoken written or heard, has its own magic and life.

One may say, it is the consequences of freedom of speech. But
there has never been and never would be any form of absolute
freedom of expression. It is always linked with responsibility
and common sense.

The distinguished journalist and scholar Edmund Lambeth
formulated four principles to serve as the foundation for ethics
in journalism. These basic principles journalists should serve as
inspiration and the basis of media ethics:

o Truth telling must always be paramount;

o freedom for journalistic independence must be maintained;

o justice must combine fairness in reporting as well as
exposing of injustices;

o journalists should always address the issue of humanity, and
should not be guilty of committing direct, intentional harm to
others and they should, wherever possible, prevent suffering.

There will always be many ethnic, cultural and religious
problems. However, journalists have to show awareness and
sensitivity to avoid being an unwitting instrument of conflict
escalation.

Defending religious identity without the extremes of "cultural
minimalism" or violent conflict is possible, provided that the
non-Muslim, as well as the media in Muslim-dominated countries,
accept the condition of democracy and the reality of pluralism.

The thinking journalist's great contribution lies in helping
political leaders to re-examine the path via which a modern
society gets its pluralistic nature. It should be advanced
towards a flexible and open society. Journalists will then become
vanguards in society where journalism will not focus on race,
culture, religion and color -- but on fellowship of human beings.