Asia-Pacific, Headlines

MEDIA-INDONESIA: Television’s Mettle Tested in Apr. 5 Poll

Andreas Harsono

JAKARTA, Apr 3 2004 (IPS) - Karni Ilyas finds himself in a tricky situation at the height of the election season, just days before Indonesia’s Apr. 5 vote.

He heads not only the newsroom of SCTV, one of Indonesia’s largest television stations, but also chairs the Indonesian Television Broadcasting Association, known by its local acronym ATVSI, at a time when television is the most important medium in the country and plays a crucial role in shaping perceptions – and votes – in its national election. ”I don’t want a single TV station to become the mouthpiece of a political party. ATVSI has drawn the line. We want to be neutral,” Karni said in an interview with IPS.

How to do that is far from easy for Indonesia’s television stations in an environment much more free and vibrant than under Suharto’s three-decade authoritarian rule, which ended in May 1998.

In the five years after that, the number of newspapers rose from less than 260 to more than 800, television channels from only six to 29, radio stations from 600 to 1,200, and the number of journalists from 6,000 to more than 25,000.

Today, according to a survey by the Washington-based International Republican Institute, 90 percent of those polled named television as their source of information about politics, especially for Monday’s parliamentary election. Only four percent said they get information the radio and only two percent from newspapers.

But while television’s reach is impressive, Karni feels uneasy about how the industry has been performing.

In March, Indonesia’s Broadcasting Commission announced that many television stations had breached both the broadcasting and the election campaign regulations, ranging from running too many political advertisements to allowing one owner to use his television station for his own political campaign. The owner in question is Surya Paloh, a presidential candidate from the Golkar Party who is also the owner of Metro TV.

”Metro TV has disproportionately given Surya Paloh too much air time,” said commissioner Bimo Nugroho. Paloh’s speeches are shown on Metro TV repeatedly, sometimes twice a day, while other candidates and parties had less exposure.

But asked about his views on Metro TV’s performance, Karni Ilyas said diplomatically: ”I cannot make a judgment on Metro TV because I rarely watch TV. I only watch SCTV’s news, not even SCTV’s programmes.”

Television stations have also been working closely with cellular phone operators to conduct polling, using short messages or SMS that interested viewers can send through their handphones, on presidential candidates.

The results of such polls are usually shown as running text on television screens, often creating the false perception that one or another candidate is likely to win due to higher SMS results.

Professional researchers question this kind of trending, because a good survey should be based on a method of random sampling, they say. ”The researcher should choose a poll subject, not the other way round, where the subject chooses a survey,” Eriyanto of the Indonesian Survey Institute and author of a book on sampling methodology said in an interview. The issue of giving fair airtime to different political views and use of television for partisan purposes are but some of the tricky challenges for the television industry.

In many ways, its mettle, independence and professionalism is also going to be tested in the poll, where 24 political parties will be seeking the support of nearly 148 million voters among Indonesia’s 217 million citizens. Indonesia’s first direct presidential poll, which is scheduled for two rounds on Jul. 5 and Sep. 20, will be organised after the parliamentary composition is in place.

But problems like the lack of professional human resources, fierce business competition, and what critics call ‘wayward’ owners like Surya Paloh that might hamper reliable and fair coverage, Indonesia’s 11 national and 18 local television stations are not all performing that poorly.

Commissioner Bimo Nugroho acknowledges that every newsroom understands that it has to be independent from the competing political parties. In general, many say, this election coverage has been better than that in 1997 – at the time all existing six stations were controlled by the cronies of former President Suharto.

Ray Wijaya, the deputy chief editor of TPI, another national channel, tells IPS that his management has given him total independence in carrying out his work, but that his problem is lack of human resources.

On average, Wijaya assigns only 12 reporter-camera person teams everyday – and this already includes those who cover the crime beat. Likewise, the 12 pairs are far from enough to cover Jakarta.

Wijaya, however, stresses that his station is now relatively independent from Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, the eldest daughter of Suharto who founded the station in 1991 and is running for a parliamentary seat in the Monday vote.

Rukmana now controls less than 20 percent of TPI’s shares, although the public perception is that it is still controlled by her.

The Bimantara business group took over TPI from Rukmana late last year. Bimantara, also founded by another Suharto son, now controls the majority shares of RCTI, Indonesia’s largest private channel, and Global TV, which cooperates with MTV Asia in broadcasting music programmes.

Even with this, Wiyaja says the radical changes in the media and television landscape since the Suharto days have already grown deep roots today.

”We even now do not run Bu Tutut’s political advertisements,” said Ray Wijaya, referring to Rukmana by her nickname.