Page 166 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Pak A. elaborated, saying,
[The idea is] to give information about current events but not in a transparent
manner, if for instance there is a con®ict between inhabitants of a place, between
people, between members of a different ethnic group or religion it is not necessary
to mention the ethnic group or religion so that this does not cause injury or pro-
voke revenge from another side, so yes there were people killed, yes there was an
incident, OK, but who was behind this, who caused this incident does not have to
be written so that the information does not spread to the other side.
Pak S. broke in with additional clari¤cation:
For instance, where, let’s see, between Malifut and Kao, we report that there was a
clash between the people of Malifut and those of Kao in which ¤ve people were
killed, that’s it, enough said, there was a house of worship burnt down, don’t say
it was a mosque, don’t say it was a church. In this way, we take a kind of action
which is objective yet constructive, the end all of it is constructive. If we want to
be objective in a transparent manner then this will in fact be destructive because
it will trigger con®icts. If that is the case then it would be better not to report at
all. So we have two alternatives, either not to report at all or to report in a way that
is objective and constructive.

Besides the amount of self-re®ection among journalists and other media
practitioners in the post-Suharto era that the foregoing indicates, there are a
number of other remarkable aspects of the discourse on proactive journalism
or constructive objectivity that I would like to highlight. Quite striking is the
rapid evolution of the notion of transparency in relation to the political as evi-
denced in my conversation with the two Manado Pos journalists. As James Siegel
(1998a, 75, N1) points out, the term “transparency” was co-opted by Indone-
sian students in their earliest calls for reformasi from IMF discourse where it
indicated full access to the state and the activities of ¤nancial institutions. Rap-
idly, however, “transparency” came to describe “the desirability of political
events also being open to view” (ibid). By extension, those aspects of politi-
cal, social, and economic life that remained hidden were regarded as corrupt
and glossed under the rubric of KKN or “korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme” (ibid.). By
the summer of 2001, when I returned again to Indonesia, “transparency” had
entered everyday parlance and enjoyed multiple application—as, for instance,
when Moluccan refugees from different camps in the Manado area complained
at a meeting that the ®ow of their Supermie Noodle supply was insuf¤ciently
transparan. In other words, they suspected that some sort of KKN was inter-
vening in the rations they received from the provincial government.
In the conversation with Pak A. and Pak S., this relationship between what
should be brought to public view or, in their case, reported on, and what should
remain hidden, be obliterated, or hushed up seems entirely reversed; that is,
much of what makes the political the political or the violent perhaps somewhat
locatable is left out of the picture with the aim of a constructive and responsible
journalism. Only the starkest outlines of a violent occurrence make it into the
newspaper and hence, also, into public view—the fact of a clash or con®ict, the

Media and Violence in an Age of Transparency 155