Indonesian Press Council Ponders Limits Of Journalism

TheJakartaGlobe – Despite the new “non-factual” label put on racy gossip shows known as infotainment, Press Council member Agus Sudibyo said over the weekend that a small number of the shows could qualify as journalistic products.

“But only very few of them offer content that is pertinent to public interest and has news value,” Agus said.

He said coverage of Miss Indonesia 2006 Nadine Chandrawinata being appointed a tourism ambassador and actress Julia Perez opening a football school were two examples of infotainment stories with news value.

But representatives of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) said during a discussion on Friday that the overwhelming majority of stories carried by infotainment shows concerned private matters with no relevance to the public.

They pointed to stories about Julia Perez pondering whether to have vaginoplasty.

Infotainment workers are recognized as journalists only by the Indonesian Journalist Association (PWI), one of the three associations for journalists accredited by the Press Council.

The other two are the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) and the Indonesian Television Journalists Association (IJTI).

Agus said the Press Council would always welcome new associations, including those for infotainment workers, but added that “it is imperative that they show compliance to the code of ethics, for example, respect for sources’ privacy.”

He said the council evaluated journalist associations every year on adequate regional representation and consistent adherence to the journalistic code of ethics.

“Let them prove that they can adhere to the code of ethics first and then we can start discussions to determine if they are journalists,” Agus said.

However, he did acknowledge that infotainment workers themselves may be the victims of a system that left no room for quality.

“This is also a problem faced by journalists working for mainstream media,” he said. “There are systematic and structural conditions that force them to work like that, so we also have to look at this problem from a comprehensive point of view.”

Debate and criticism over infotainment, as investigative journalist Dandhy Dwi Laksono pointed out during the discussion, has been raging for years.

But it reached a new height on Wednesday when lawmakers from House of Representatives Commission I, which deals with information affairs, agreed to label gossip shows as non-factual, making them subject to censorship.

Infotainment programs, under their current format, “we are all aware, disregard the code of ethics and are not journalism,” said Amir Effendi Siregar, director of Media Regulation and Regulator Watch.