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Jakarta Post

Good journalism matters

With so much disinformation and so much effort made to control the flow of information, journalism continues to play a crucial role. 

Editorial board (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Fri, October 2, 2020

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Good journalism matters

W

hat a time to be alive. If we can come out of the other side unscathed, 2020 will certainly be one of the most consequential moments in human history.

Last year, who would have thought that a flu-like pandemic could kill more than 1 million people, infect more than 34 million and drive tens of millions of people to unemployment. The last time the world saw this kind of plague was more than a century ago during the Spanish flu pandemic.

And as if the pandemic was not bad enough, it strikes at the worst time possible, when even in the world's most developed nations, politics has gone south. Everywhere we look, when democracy is regressing, populism is rising and political polarization is running high.

In most countries, COVID-19 only serves to aggravate some of the political problems and its consequences could be dire. In places where populist leaders are in charge, their disregard of science has allowed for haphazard measures to deal with the pandemic leading to a surge in cases and deaths.

In some places, some of these political leaders go even further by peddling false information about the coronavirus. Even on issues that scientists and public health experts have already come to a consensus about, such as wearing masks, people still have differing views based on their political beliefs.

Also, in countries where the government just wants to look good on paper, some actively suppress information regarding the severity of the pandemic.

Against this backdrop, the role of the media is more important than ever. With so much disinformation and so much effort made to control the flow of information, journalism continues to play a crucial role to inform and enlighten the public. Democracy can only work when the public is educated, and now this democracy can save us from a pandemic.

In the past seven months, we have seen first-hand how the public wants to be educated about the coronavirus. In the first three months after the first cases of COVID-19 were announced in March, we saw a huge spike in the number of visitors to our website. These readers certainly wanted to verify the claim that an antivirus necklace could help prevent coronavirus transmission.

But with the COVID-19-induced recession and the changing media landscape, thanks to the arrival of news aggregator sites and social media platforms, it is not always easy for us to continue doing good journalism. The old business model, which relies on advertising and print subscriptions, no longer works for most media companies.

Yet it is difficult to imagine Indonesia without The Jakarta Post. The change of guard on Oct. 1 was part of the process of transforming this legacy publication to make it possible to have a sustainable operation in the long run. We hope you can always support our endeavor, especially during these challenging times.

This is the worst of times, this is the best of times.

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