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ress Council executives and communication practitioners have said that the mass media has tended to take sides and be inconsistent in maintaining impartiality when covering regional elections throughout the country.

Press Council chairman Bagir Manan said in Medan, North Sumatra, on Saturday that the absence of neutrality in regional elections was intended mainly for the interest of certain groups.

He said the absence of such neutrality was wrong based on the consideration of people’s freedom to choose.

“There is a possibility for the mass media to take sides, but that should be based on the function of the press to act in the public interest and should follow the journalistic code of ethics,” Bagir Manan said in a seminar entitled “Political Constellations toward the North Sumatra Regional Elections 2013 and the Local Mass Media’s Impartiality” at the Sociopolitical Science School of the University of North Sumatra (USU).

He further said that the absence of neutrality could be seen in the appearance of new publications that were intentionally run ahead of elections and also due to collaboration between the press and candidates.

When asked whether there would be sanctions against those elements of the media taking sides in regional elections, the former chief justice said that this would not be the case because it had not been regulated in the Press Law.

One of the seminar participants proposed a revision of the Press Law to Bagir Manan, with regard to the absence of neutrality in the mass media. Bagir agreed with the proposal, but for the current situation it was not conducive enough to revise the law.

Syafruddin Pohan, a lecturer of the USU’s Communication Science School, said that current research had uncovered that the media frequently took sides in its reportage to enable certain candidates to win elections.

Syafruddin cited an example in the North Sumatra gubernatorial elections in 2008, and said a similar thing had been noted by the public ahead of the 2013 gubernatorial election.

“Even though the election will be held in the next two years, there has been a decision by certain media to take the sides of certain candidates. Such practices are improper, as they show a strengthening tendency toward transactional political practices in the mass media,” he said.

However, chief editor of the Medan Bisnis daily, Bersihar Lubis, said it was right for the media to take sides in regional elections due to the rising number of media publications.

“It’s like a contestant who launches new media as his medium to socialize his programs. It’s not against the law,” said Bersihar, who is also a former reporter of Tempo magazine.

Bersihar admitted that advertisement contracts were usually compensation for the decision of the media to take the sides of certain candidates in regional elections.