Page 163 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

7 Media and Violence in an Age of

Transparency: Journalistic Writing

on War-Torn Maluku

Patricia Spyer

The war takes place in black and white. For those on the sidelines that is. For
those who are actually in it there are many colors, excessive colors, too bright,
too red and orange, too liquid and incandescent, but for the others the war is
like a newsreel—grainy, smeared, with bursts of staccato noise and large num-
bers of grey-skinned people rushing or plodding or falling down, everything
elsewhere.
She goes to the newsreels, in the movie theatres. She reads the papers. She
knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events
have no mercy.
—Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Prominent among the various emergent publicities in post-Suharto Indonesia
is one that crystallizes around the term “transparency” as the imagined future
for a new more democratic nation. Hijacked from International Monetary Fund
(IMF) discourse in the heady days of student rebellion and calls for reformasi 1
in the spring of 1998, the discourse on “transparency” as it relates to journalis-
tic practice has gone hand in hand with the mushrooming of watchdog me-
dia groups and journalist organizations as well as the proliferation of forums,
seminars, and training sessions devoted to the professionalization of media
practitioners or to speci¤c topics like “peace journalism” (jurnalisme damai or
jurnalisme kasih sayang) or reporting on AIDS, women’s issues, and the like (Is-
pandriarno 2001, 6). 2
This paper considers some contradictions in the deployment of the concept
of “transparency”—speci¤cally the narrative strategies developed by a number
of Indonesian journalists within the wider space of transactions, dilemmas, de-
sires, and revisions that more generally describe the place of the media in post-
Suharto Indonesia. Advocates of democratic ideals of transparency and jour-
nalistic practice and active in a range of reformasi-inspired media initiatives,
these men invented a minimalist form of reporting on violence with the aim,