Dramatized Coverage Turning Terrorists Into Heroes, Experts Warn

News coverage and analysis of terrorism should not be allowed to become a platform for extremists to get their message across to the public, media experts said on Thursday.

Umar Idris, secretary of the Jakarta chapter of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), said that while the media had a duty to present the terrorists’ side of the story, they should be careful about opening up the chance for the terrorists to disseminate their ideology to the public.

“Confirmation and clarification are always obligatory, but in this case it should be done in a neutral way without dramatizing the issue,” he said.

He added that media reports should not campaign on behalf of the terrorists, even implicitly.

“The problem in reporting on terrorism often arises when confirming and clarifying the news; that’s when the reports often become dramatized.”

Umar also said the media should not rely solely on official sources such as the police and should look to other sources to provide different perspectives on the issue.

“Otherwise they’ll fail to satisfy the audience’s curiosity,” he explained.

This is where it becomes important to equip journalists with the necessary skills to do research and collect data, he said, to allow them to take control of an interview session and avoid being manipulated to get a certain message across. “That way, the journalist can ask the terrorists or suspects more critical questions,” Umar said.

He conceded that in some ways, the media had served to further the terrorist cause by raising public fears through unnecessary dramatization of their news reports.

“There’s no need for hours of live television reporting on a police raid, for instance,” he said.

He argued this kind of fear-mongering could be easily avoided if media outlets adhered strictly to the journalistic code of ethics and if broadcasters abided by the programming standards and broadcasting code of conduct (P3SPS) set out by the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI).

What media outlets could do instead of sensationalized coverage, Umar suggested, was to cover the human interest side of terrorism by exploring the suffering experienced by members of the immediate family of terrorists and terror suspects.

“It could have a touchy yet critical angle, that as a result of these individuals’ terror acts, there are losses that their families have to endure,” he said.

“That would be a way of educating the public about the price that these terrorists’ families have to pay for their acts.”

Noor Huda Ismail, a security analyst from the International Peace Building Institute, agreed there needed to be a change in the way that Indonesian media outlets covered terrorism stories.

He said the current coverage tended to be a one-track narrative from the terrorists’ point of view.

“The media needs to change its approach,” he said.

“We need to cover both sides and we have to be more on the side of the victims of terrorism — those who were killed and their families — instead of putting more emphasis on the terrorists’ perspective.”

He added that the media and terrorism had the same basic purpose of getting a message out to the public, and as such there was the danger of unwanted overlap.

“Indonesian media tend to love putting a lot of drama in their stories, such as by quoting terrorists who shout ‘I want to die as a martyr’ or ‘I want to kill,’ ” the analyst said.

“The media shouldn’t be the agents communicating what the terrorists want. We need to stop picturing terrorists as celebrities. When we classify them as ‘wanted,’ that is turning them into celebrities.”

Noor said the coverage in print media remained largely balanced and objective, but the real problem was with television coverage.

“Dramatized television coverage of terrorism is dangerous for society,” he said.

(x the JG)