September 25, 2012
Uncategorized
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Fair and Balanced

Incumbent Fauzi Bowo (l) and challenger Joko Widodo at a debate. Widodo won, and will take office next week

Why is Joko Widodo winning the Jakarta gubernatorial election such a big deal? Well, apart from the unusual and refreshing campaign style (focusing on regular people and social media, instead of endorsements by the religious and political elite) Jokowi is as clean as a whistle, as far as his track record is concerned. He’s never even been accused of corruption. This is quite rare in a country where dozens of MPs are implicated in corruption scandals every year, and quite a lot of mayors, regents and governors as well.

Some of them (more and more, thankfully) even get prosecuted. But many seem to be left alone, even after serious allegations. It’s interesting to see the role of the press in this regard: like I said earlier, Indonesian journalists are more respectful towards men in power than western colleagues. Among other things, it means that they give public officials a lot of chances to deny any and all wrongdoings – what I’d like to call the ‘Saddam Hussein strategy’ (“relax, guy!”): just say “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m innocent.”

For instance, in a recent interview (requires a login to read) with Koran Tempo, governor Syahrul Yasin Limpo of South Sulawesi gets hundreds of words to say that he’s surprised and dismayed to be linked by the KPK (anti-corruption commission) to a corrupt regent. There is no mention of the credibility and gravity of these allegations, it’s just ‘big man’ SYL making a case for himself. He even gets to ‘excuse’ a journalist who dared to ask him a confrontational, direct question.

Now, this may have to do with a stylistic difference: instead of the confrontational style of western journalists, their colleagues here work in a more respectful, roundabout way. Corruption and crime still get attention in the press, so it’s no problem.

But recent remarks by AJI, the organization of Indonesian journalists, imply that there’s something else going on as well. In the run-up to the elections in Jakarta, between incumbent Fauzi Bowo and challenger Joko Widodo, they claimed:

There is a bias [in Indonesian journalism] as the politics have influenced everyone from the owners to the editors and all the way to the bottom with the reporters.

Their proof for this bias:

According to the results, the surveyed news outlets ran 121 negative stories about Fauzi between August and September 13. The same media organizations ran 90 negative stories about Joko. […] The report was consistent with a longer project conducted between June 1 and September 13, during which reporters wrote 260 negative stories about Fauzi and 172 about Joko. When it came to positive stories, the news outlets ran 666 positive stories about Fauzi and 810 about Joko, according to the survey.

This is presented as a bad thing.

So, an organization of journalists says that in order to be objective, there simply need to be equal amounts of positive and negative stories on candidates in an election. It seems like searching for the truth doesn’t even factor into this. There has been a debate about this in the US for a number of years, where some colleagues lament the tendency to just let everybody have their say, without trying to find out who is right. If an article is ‘balanced’, does that make it trustworthy?

To get back to Jokowi: his opponent Fauzi Bowo has recently been accused of syphoning off hundreds of millions of rupiah from state funds to use for his own re-election campaign. These are serious and seemingly well-researched allegations. How could you possibly have the same amounts of negative stories about him, as about a squeaky-clean guy like Jokowi? You’d have to pull criticism out of thin air, just to meet that demand.