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	Human Rights Defender

Free Media in ASEAN: A Reality or Myth?

Sonny Inbaraj [*]

For the most part, knowledge of such situations were contained by the limits of communication technol-ogies. Ignorance was bliss or at least an excuse for not taking action.

By the middle of the 20th century, news of events around the world reached our doorstep in a matter of days. Today we watch events unfold in real time. It is far more difficult to ignore known situations in which ethical or moral standards are compromised. With the activities of the world being replayed for us in our living room each night and reported in the next morning's papers, none of us can feign ignorance about affrontsto society's ethical standards.

Brotherõs Keeper

Flashed around the globe in a matter of seconds, information about each new atrocity fuels citizen outrage and escalates demands for redress.

The democratic postulate is that the media is independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that it does not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived. However, the harsh reality of the popular media has to be acknowledged.

As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have pointed out in their seminal work, "Manufacturing Consent", in contrast to the standard conception of the media as unrelentless in its pursuit for truth and the independence of authority, there is actually a propaganda dimension involved - a model that sees the media as serving a "societal purpose", but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities.

On the contrary, Herman and Chomsky point out, a propaganda model suggests that the "societal purpose" of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.

In my experience with the media, the press can serve this "societal purpose" in many ways: through selection of stories, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.

Southeast Asia

Coverage in the Western press of Cambodia and East Timor could shed some light on this phenomenon. While the press relentlessly focussed its attention on Cambodia in the Pol Pot era, helping mobilise the pop-ulace against the so-called comm-unist enemy, the numerous victims of the US bombing before the communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the elite American press.

After Pol Pot's ousting by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted support to this "worse than Hitler" villain who was being propped up by the Asean states, with little notice in the press, which adjusted once again to the national political agenda.

Attention to the Indonesian massacres of 1965-66, after the coup staged against Sukarno, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor from 1975 onward, would also be distinctly unhelpful as bases of media campaigns, the sole reason being that Indonesia is an ally of the United States and the Jakarta regimeunder General Suharto maintains an open door policy to Western investment.

Also in East Timor, the United States bears a major responsibility for the slaughter there. Media campaigns on behalf of the Timorese people would come into conflict with government-business interests, and would not be able to pass through the news filtering process.

In Asean, too, the situation is not much different. Almost from the onset of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, Asean member countries arrived at a "consensus" that the matter was an internal Indonesian affair.

The Asean doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of a member country prevails till today, ipso facto, allowing the Asean nations to turn a blind eye to the ongoing genocide of the Timorese people.

The stock Indonesian response is that if only the liberal press was gagged or fell in line with the Indonesian/Asean consensus, then the East Timor problem would be forgotten by theworld. Sadly, the Asean press seems to be toeing this line.

After the Dili massacre on Nov 12, 1991, when Indonesian troops fired on unarmed Timorese protesters clamouring for their independence, aside from the Western press, official media reactions in Asean were muted.

For example, the Singapore Straits Times carried a report that began with 12 paragraphs from its Jakarta correspondent, presenting the official Indonesian view of events from the Foreign Ministry and the government-controlled news agency, Antara. No less bland was the front page story in the Malaysian New Straits Times under the banner headline "Jakarta blames Fretilin for the killings", despite the fact that a New Zealand student of Malaysian origin was one of the many killed in the Santa Cruz cemetery. So, the Asean press coverage of East Timor comes across as one of the cruder aspects of Asean media management. In the coverage of Burma and the pro-democracy movement, seldom is prominence given by the Asean press to Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy. The official Asean media seem to be coddling the Burmese military regime in view of their governments' attempts to secure lucrative contracts from the junta. Aung San Suu Kyi is thus seen as a thorn by Asean governments in their attempts to rape Burma and the Burmese people, in the name of "constructive engagement."

Selectivity

Central is the assumption that existing media ownership places commercial interests as paramount. In this case human rights violations emanating from Asean's trading partners, if reported, will always be perceived as restraints on trade - where media exposure acts as a deterrent to the investment policies of the concerned countries.

Messages from and about dissidents and weak, unorganised individuals and groups, domestic and foreign do not make news in the mainstream press for the simple reasons that most of the time they do not suit the ideology or interests of the media owners or other powerful parties.

A newspaper in Asean, for that matter that, chooses to feature, for instance, the Indonesian armed forces' violence against their own cit-izenry and the Timorese people: would elicit flak from the domestic government, business and organised right-wing think-tanks. Also they might be looked upon with disfavour by the corporate community supporting the Suharto regime (including advertisers) for indulging in such a quixotic interest and crusade. They would tend to stand alone in Asean in focusing on victims that, from the standpoint of the prevailing Asean "consensus", are unworthy of any media coverage.

As James Dunn, the former Australian consul to East Timor recently argued, until and unless the issue of human rights is presented as universal and trans-national, the media must bear some responsibility for the world's shortcomings.