Page 164 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

in their view, of foreclosing a negative form of media agency within the Moluc-
can con®ict at the far eastern end of Indonesia—one, in other words, that would
foster rather than alleviate hatred and violence.
In addition to their own arguments and strategies, I re®ect on the possible
effects of such a proactive, stripped-bare form of reporting both as a politics
and a form of mass mediation. Much like war watched from the sidelines, I sug-
gest how the black and white language of such writing—bereft of the liquid,
incandescent colors, shadows, messy contingencies and contexts describing the
experience of those “actually in” the war—facilitates a reading of the con®ict
in the starkest of terms. In the case of Maluku, it provides the language and
thereby also the means for glossing over—under the readily available rubric of
“religion”—a very complicated, fraught, mobile terrain made up of histories,
grievances, friendships, alliances, long-standing rivalries, customs of trust and
accountability, power structures, political economy, and, last but not least, the
legacies of New Order cultural politics. I also speculate on how the spectraliza-
tion of violence, which I see as paradoxically enabled by the particular form of
proactive journalism discussed here, may, in turn, produce more violence.

Transparencies
In May 2000, during a brief visit to Manado, the predominantly Chris-
tian capital of the province of North Sulawesi, I spoke with two of the three
journalists who had been directly involved in the project of the new daily Radar
Ternate, which was subsequently given the more geopolitically comprehensive
name of Radar Kieraha in honor of the four mountains cum early sultanates
of Ternate, Tidore, Bacan, and Makian in North Maluku. As a member of the
editorial team of Manado Pos which produced the paper, Pak A. had supervised
the new daily from the distance of Manado. Pak S., in charge of reporting on
the goings-on in the city of Ternate, the DPRD (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat
Daerah) or regional government, the police, or, as he summed it up, “issues of
government,” had been based in Ternate from September 1999 until Decem-
ber 28 of the same year when violence in this city forced Radar Kieraha to stop
its circulation. A third journalist who dealt with matters of economics and de-
velopment, and as of May 2000 had relocated to Gorontalo, another city in
North Sulawesi, had, along with Pak S., been based in Ternate.
Besides, as I was told, reasons of “bisnis,” the idea behind the launching of
Radar Kieraha was essentially twofold: to give a kado or gift to the new province
of North Maluku and to provide people (masyarakat) in an area where they “do
3
not understand the role of the press” with their own daily newspaper. The ideo-
logical underpinning of this move, as it was explained to me, is that in the era
of reformasi (reform) the role of the people would also be articulated through
a media controlled by the people who, speci¤cally, would “exercise supervision
on the (actions of the) government” and “criticize things that are wrong.” Al-
ready from September 1999 on, however, when Pak S. arrived in Ternate, a
succession of political problems and con®icts undermined this ideal vision of

Media and Violence in an Age of Transparency 153