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Flags of Indonesia and Australia with a white flag in the middle. (Shutterstock/-)
T
he April 17 general elections and its fallout could have been big news in Australia. According to some experts, they should have been.
Instead, media consumers Down Under got more of United States’ President Donald Trump’s distant domestic political shenanigans than they did of the blood and fire crises facing their neighbor nation and its President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
The result from the world’s third-largest democracy staging the world’s biggest one-day election will impact many countries, but most particularly the adjacent southern continent.
Although the times have been tumultuous, consumers of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s sound and vision news bulletins would have concluded most salient events were happening 13,000 kilometers distant in the Northern Hemisphere — not next door.
Using the ABC’s website search box, “Widodo” appears only a dozen times compared with 150 for “Trump” in the same seven-week period. “Indonesia” featured on 60 occasions.
The Australian national newspaper did better with 36 mentions of “Widodo”.
This survey doesn’t measure story length, prominence, or note overlap. It’s a crude measure of quantity, not quality. That doesn’t undermine the point: the gap is too wide.
