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Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Walkley Asia Media Lecture
by Goenawan Mohamad
Founder and former editor, Tempo magazine

ASIALINK - December 7th, 1999

Asialink, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Media Alliance to bring me from Jakarta to Melbourne to speak to you today.

To be honest, I decided to take the assignment because I always like to go to Melbourne. But I also believe that the Myer Walkley Asia Media Lecture will be a useful forum to generate dialogues among concerned people in this region.  I am grateful for this privilege.  I am happy to share with you my random thoughts on the media's position in the management (or the mismanagement) of the dialogues.  I believe that it is a timely subject.  

The relationship between Indonesia and Australia has not been exactly cordial these days. To be sure, the level of noise and insanity of the acrimony is no longer as alarming as it was in the past months. I have the impression that almost everyone agrees that nothing productive will come out from the current lack of bilateral enthusiasm, following the large-scale violence that took place in East Timor in September.  And yet, after some flagrantly false steps and unwise statements made by national leaders of both sides, nothing noticeable has been done to deal with the diplomatic damage.

Typically, politicians and bureaucrats blame the media for the mess, and in return, the media blame politicians. Yesterday I happened to read an October issue of The Bulletin (Oct.12, 1999). The cover story discloses a "very discreet meeting" between Foreign Minister Downer and the Indonesian Ambassador Wiryono in Canberra, as news of killings in East Timor was emerging last September. According The Bulletin's story, in the meeting, the ambassador was angry.  He blamed, among many targets, the Australian media as "anti-Indonesian".  Mr. Downer, who tried to assuage his special guest, blamed nobody.  But The Bulletin seems to argue that such a gentle and discreet pressure on Indonesia was not enough to prevent further atrocity in East Timor. 

But should we believe that our life, and its tragedy, is simply governed by some inept gentlemen at the helms and the evening news? I doubt it. Having said that, I must admit that there are legitimate reasons to question the capacity of journalists to opt for sobriety in dealing with their own moral outrage or their sense of national guilt. 

A recent study conducted by a Jakarta-based organisation, ISAI (Institute for the study of free flow of information), analyses the way Indonesian and foreign publications write about the referendum in East Timor and its aftermath. The study uses nine newspapers published in August, September and October 1999. 

The first part of the study focuses on four Indonesian newspapers, each representing a certain level of quality and "business performance": Kompas, Republika, Rakyat Merdeka and Pos Kota. The study discovers how minimal is the use of East Timorese sources in these Indonesian media.  Most of the stories quote Indonesian officials, politicians and NGO activists. No wonder that there is a strong suggestion that the outcome of the referendum was due to Unamet's failure to stay "neutral".  Worse still, parallel to the Indonesian government's line, most stories in the newspapers selected for the study prefer to see the ensuing violence as an expression of a long-standing conflict between East Timorese groups.  The newspapers fail to investigate the Indonesian military involvement in the post-referendum savagery.  It occurs to me that the Indonesian media have still a huge problem in dealing with their country's sense of guilt and embarrassment.

The result is a clumsy, even ugly, journalism. But then, a newspaper is never an isolated institution. It may have to resign to the psychology of collective shame in its society. A newspaper is never simply a creation of its editor and publisher.  It is also a creature of its own audience.

The second part of the study is more interesting. It focuses on five foreign publications from the month of August 1999 until mid-October. A total of 172 articles published in The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Economist, TIME, Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune and The Sydney Morning Herald were selected.

The ISAI analysis reveals "a degree of bias reflected in a predominance of Western sources quoted".  Of 270 "official" sources quoted, 66% were either UN spokespeople or Western government/military leaders.  The rest, only 34% of them, were Asian government sources.  Furthermore, with the exception of The Economist, the publications studied all give considerably larger space for East Timorese sources who support independence: 62% independence supporters are quoted, as compared to 38% sources from the anti-independence camp.  More important still, the study says, is the fact that most of the anti-independence quotes are "nothing more than sensationalistic sound-bytes", such as the oft-quoted militia threat to "eat the hearts" of Australian troops. There is little engagement with the reason why a small but significant group of East Timorese prefer to remain part of Indonesia.

The way foreign media reported the post-referendum violence is another case of biased judgment, according to the ISAI study. "Allusions have been made to the alleged similarity of the East Timor case with horrors of the Rwanda genocide, the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia"  On three separate occasions, The Sydney Morning Herald alludes to the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Yet estimates of the actual numbers affected by are "pointedly vague", as the ISAI study suggests.  Most reports refer to "scores" or "hundreds" killed, while a few bravely assert that the dead may number in the thousands. One journalist from The Sydney Morning Herald announces that "maybe tens of thousands" have been killed. 

If its assessment is correct, the ISAI study does not make the Herald story an example of good journalism.   Using the word "maybe" is equal to giving oneself a license to put any number next to it. Comparing the East Timorese tragedy with 5 million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust is a misleading hyperbole. The East Timorese victims were not murdered according a racist plan to carry through "the final solution". There is no way one can down play the magnitude of suffering in this part of the world. But I always remember a senior British journalist who told me that in stories about war and cruelty, when our passion for justice tips the scale, often truth is the first casualty.

But what is "truth"?  It is a disturbing question, in a time when even prominent thinkers are no longer convinced of the virtue of consensus. To be sure, as every one knows, a journalistic piece is different from lyrical poetry. It is not because a poet, as one philosopher puts it, lies too much, but it is because journalistic writing is the most reader-oriented text. One has to write with a keen sense of the reader's imaginary presence.  Every single sentence is a meeting point between of "W" and "R", meaning the writer's habitus and his/her reader's. Ultimately, the "R" determines the prose and its criteria of truth. A more stable linguistic context inevitably frames every news story.

The problem is that today we live in an era when there is no guarantee for such stability. The outreach, the speed and the quantity of information are increasingly bedazzling. The ideal reader has become an elusive concept.

You write a story and the publisher puts it on-line - and you are no longer sure who will read you, in which part of the world, and at what time of the day.In such a situation, it is easy to be charmingly glib in one's journalistic presentation. There is an explanation for this. We know that a story requires several sentences, and each sentence requires a subject. The problem is that today even the subject, or the "who" and the "what" in one's story, are no longer easy to identify.  To identify is to put a subject into a category of beings commonly acknowledged by the writer and the reader - but today a writer is much more uncertain of his or her ideal reader. No one seems to be there, carefully monitoring the text, sharing the burden of defining the subject.   

In recent years, every time I read a story about Indonesia, I have the feeling that the writer almost unilaterally forces the subject of his story on me. The other day I read in The Washington Post a commentary by Jim Hoagland on the relation between East Timor and Indonesia. In his opening, he uses the word "the Javanese politicians" to describe people who rule Indonesia from Jakarta, which is in the island of Java.  The word "Javanese" has, of course, an ethnic connotation, but the word "Java" is not identical with a single ethnicity. In short, Hoagland chooses the wrong word for the subject. But I can imagine how difficult for Jim Hoagland to explain the ethnic and cultural complexity of Java and Indonesia to readers whose average level of learning is impossible to gauge. At the same time, I am also worried that Hoagland can easily get away with it; and will continue, with or without a trace of arrogance, to peddle his misreading of Indonesian history and geography to the world at large. And who cares?    

Still, I'd like to maintain that truth should never become the first casualty. Every self-respecting journalist has to live with the temptation not to lie, no matter how difficult it is to reach a consensus about what "truth" is.  Some one says that today we are living in a "risk society".

Humankind has to create a future without really knowing what the world is all about. This is a little bit fatalistic. But this brings along a true sense of limit and humility. 

Therefore, the talk about the power the media can be grossly misleading. No society is governed by its evening news. I believe, in a rather old-fashioned way, that a good journalism is less an extension of history than of conversation.  At least, a good journalism is an appeal for a lively conversation, although not always done in the most civilized manner.

And I think you would agree with me that a lively conversation, like a thing of beauty, is a joy forever.