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Comments: TV reality shows sell `junk food'
Two days before Ramadan started, I had a chance to watch a reality show broadcast by RCTI, Masihkah Kau Mencintaiku (MKM)
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em>Two days before Ramadan started, I had a chance to watch a reality show broadcast by RCTI, Masihkah Kau Mencintaiku (MKM). Helmi Yahya and Dian Nitami were the hosts for this program. Wearing a mask, Hani, a wife, told of not having had sex with her husband Gatot for a year. Her husband was there, as well as her relatives. Both sides then quarreled, blaming each other.
Your comments:
How can one-hour program solve a problem that has grown and gotten worse over many years? I think it's true the program is just for making money, not for education or teaching people to be more mature and civilized.
Other programs are much more unrealistic. A better program is to turn off your local TV shows. It's true, because news is not news anymore, it's been too dramatized.
Yoega Diliyanto
Jakarta
I agree with the writer. I've seen that program once. I just felt uncomfortable about their privacy. The couple agreed to disclose their personal problems and at the same time the audience in the studio and onlookers at home watch them.
The positive of this reality show is people will be informed, but on what? Instead of doing this, the couple and their relatives should bring that personal problem to their parents and elders.
They will give some advice and maybe their parents and elders will pray for their marriage.
Isaac Nyoman
Jakarta
TV reality shows sell junk food, hehehehe! I'm appalled at Metro TV running footage of a wailing and crying mother and daughters over and over and over again on TV, and also for having the audacity to give ratings (best picture) for vivid pictures/footage of the calamity in Padang. Best pictures, anyone?
Patrick J.B.
Surabaya
Quake less attractive to political parties Oct. 6, p. 4
The violent earthquake that shook West Sumatra earlier last week has garnered vast media attention, as well as helping hands from foreign countries, but little has been heard from the country's dozens of political parties.
The situation differs from when the Situ Gintung dam in Ciputat, Banten, located just southwest of Jakarta, collapsed in March, a month before the legislative elections.
Your comments: Very odd piece. Political parties on their own depending on their wherewithal can extend aid and voluntary work to the victims of the calamities. But what are their representatives at the House doing?
They are in fact in a position of power and influence to demand quick action from the government to mount rescue operations and provide food and clothing and temporary shelter for those who have lost everything and have nowhere else to turn.
As far as I know, that's a basic responsibility in any democratic government, especially when it is clear (from TV interviews with villagers) that government agencies have failed miserably to provide such assistance in a timely fashion.
Ariff
Setiawangsa, Malaysia
Expecting more blackouts -- Oct. 3, p. 6
As the country faces a severe power shortage, many customers of state-owned electricity firm PT PLN, especially outside Java, have been long familiar with frequent blackouts and have prepared to face the crisis as PLN cannot do much to help. And now Jakarta is eventually hit by the blackout threat.
Is it true that the problem has nothing to do with possible poor management or even mismanagement by PLN?
A fire gutted PLN's electricity substation in Cawang, East Jakarta, on Tuesday. The company has imposed rotating blackouts across East Jakarta and North Jakarta.
Your comments:
Makassar has now had its third blackout in 24 hours. This is not an electricity "system". The only thing "systematic" about it is its failure. They say in management that you rise to your level of incompetence.
Well it's a short trip for Makassar's electricity "managers". I disagree with the last two sentences in the original.
"All these facts above should make us realize we cannot rely on services from operators of essential services such as water and electricity. It seems we have to prepare for frequent blackouts or unreliable water supplies, with no chance to have our rights as consumers upheld."
This is the typical apathetic approach of a people who cannot or refuse to organize. It is because people aren't held to account; Indonesians don't want to offend (i.e. point out the truth), and there is a lack of critical thinking and planning.
If there is insufficient power, why are developers still allowed to subdivide the paddies? Is there any planning for a new power station? Where are the programs to subsidize domestic solar power in the absence of planning for a new power station? What is the power station going to use given Indonesia's dwindling oil reserves?
Perhaps for a service not rendered a mass protest of nonpayment might make the "managers" wake up. Make them legally responsible for failure to deliver. Surely that is what the contract they signed required of them? If not, why not?
Or is the plan to let the system fail, go off begging to some international agency to buy a shiny new power plant, refuse to maintain that as well, milk the system ... and repeat?
In the face of the challenge of climate change, Indonesia might find that "charity begins at home" and that is where donor countries are going to spend it! Indonesians don't vote in donor country electorates.
Shane Perryman
Makassar
