W

hat a week! Japan was struck by earthquake and tsunami disasters, reminding Indonesians of the similar events that wiped away over 150,000 people in Aceh in December 2004.

And in recent days, Jakartans were startled by a series of bomb threats.

As I was glued to the TV, I noticed a gap of reporting styles between foreign and local media.

Most foreign channels, including NHK reporting on its own wrecked motherland, were focusing on data and statistics from formal authorities. There were live records of unraveling calamity as the crew moved among the rubble and debris.

Yet the footage managed to maintain a neutral tone while showing just how earth-shattering the disasters were. Overly graphic images or glimpses of corpses, however briefly, remained dignified. After all, the corpses were still somebody’s loved ones.

While engaging survivors, the reporters, balanced between inquiring and respect, turned away when survivors refused interviews recorded on camera.

There were no deliberate attempts to jerk tears, yet the reportage was sufficiently presented to illustrate the damages for audiences to naturally feel overwhelmed with compassion.

This was very different from local TV stations that continuously replayed the goriest moments of Mother Nature in action — wailing injured victims, corpses in entangled mortal positions, survivors prompted by senseless interviews and ubiquitous tunes varying from heart-thumping to heart-rending to match the scenes. The whole reportage came off like a B-rated production of a cliché reality thriller.

When the very moment the Utan Kayu bomb exploded, slashing the poor policeman’s wrist, was caught on camera and replayed endlessly, there was no regard for the young TV audience or feelings for the policeman’s family.

Talk shows featured inadequate sources, not to mention well-known hardliners, claiming that Jakarta was gripped in such terror that a woman called the busy bomb squad to defuse a package that was later found to be a forgotten package of mail-ordered shoes.

Our reporters are often trapped in rhetorical, amateurish Q&A, such as “How are you feeling, being a victim of a natural disaster?” Our chaos-managing Ambassador to Japan had to field such banal questions such as why only certain Indonesians were at risk and verbally illustrate the relative location and distance of Sendai. Didn’t that TV channel have a map of Japan and couldn’t they deduce simple geographical math?

What about that interrogative tone to Muslim scholar Ulil Abshar Abdalla, asking why he wasn’t curious enough to personally call the number listed on the bomb package, knowing full well it’s now police business, as Ulil himself had declared?

When the situation in Japan escalated, foreign channels strived to introduce Nuclear 101 and practical solutions applicable to Fukushima, while local TV stations played on potential destruction, drawing as far as Chernobyl, featuring so-called experts to prematurely debate the prospect of Indonesia’s nuclear plant expectations. Panic broke out. The Association of Indonesian Students in Japan issued a statement criticizing Indonesian media.

Local media, especially TV stations that hold more captivating power, need to seriously shape up. Start from knowing the basic terms, like differentiating between actual breaking news and live coverage of already anticipated events and the importance of correctly pronouncing whether a package is suspected to be a bomb, or in the process of being checked, or already classified as a bomb by authorities, or has already been defused by a bomb squad, instead of just using one word, “bomb”, throughout.

You might go after ratings, but never forget your reporting objects are often as human as your entire audience. There are more professional ways to deliver facts and display humanity without being reduced to tabloid-style reporting. Please!

— Lynda Ibrahim