An Indonesian police officer guards the house where the Temanggung shootout took place. Analysts gave the media low marks for their coverage of the raid.
“Inaccurate,” “speculative” and “little different from reality TV” are how media experts and analysts are describing the intense television coverage of the police siege on a terrorist hideaway in rural Central Java over the weekend .
Iwan Awaluddin Yusuf, a media lecturer from the Indonesian Islamic University in Yogyakarta, said the coverage was a form of sensationalized reporting based only on media assumptions and an over-dramatization of the event.
“It was an exaggeration,” Iwan said. “There was really no need to broadcast it nonstop like a reality show as there were other important news to report.”
He said the media’s incorrect announcement that the suspect shot during the siege was terror mastermind Noordin M Top was based purely on speculation and not on good journalistic practices.
Such failure to verify essential facts, he said, had also been a feature of the extensive reporting on the police manhunt for the terrorists responsible for the July 17 bombings of the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels .
He cited as an example an interview with the mother of suspected terrorist Maruto Jati Sulistiyono. The interview, he said, was turned into a cheap melodrama as scenes of the mother crying were repeatedly aired.
Media analyst and former journalist Arya Gunawan said that media reports on the bombings and manhunt too often verged on glorifying the terrorists.
“Media people need to come up with a proper format that prevents their reporting from degenerating into glorification,” Arya said, adding that while the excessive coverage was justified as informing the public, the real objective was more likely increased ratings.
He said that the public depended on the media for balanced news feeds and that it was up to the media to strive for a higher degree of objectivity and self-regulation.
The excessive coverage attracted the attention of the National Police. Its chief, Gen. Bambang Hendarso Danuri, summoned broadcasting executives from 10 Jakarta-based television stations to the police headquarters on Tuesday.
“The aggressive reporting on terrorism drew public complaints and this was probably used as a pretext by the police to warn the media,” Arya said.
While he said he objected to the police warning the media, he was disappointed that the warning did not come from the media itself. “The media have to acknowledge that their coverage of the siege was wrong,” Arya said.
The media frenzy over the police siege apparently began when Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network reported that a man believed to be Noordin was in the besieged house in Beji village.
Step Vaessen, the Al Jazeera journalist in Indonesia who reported the story, said that no media outlet would miss the opportunity to cover such blockade or announce information it regarded as coming from sound sources.
Atmakusuma Astraatmaja, the former chief of the Press Council, said it was important that media remained skeptical of tip-offs until they were thoroughly verified.
“Even if journalists have seen the news subject themselves, they still have to verify it with other sources,” he said.
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