on Indonesia Matters

[this is a specific post/open letter to the experts on Indonesian Matters and has very little international value. As always, scroll down to find more interesting things if you're not blogging/bullshitting on Indonesian politics]


Much been said about bloggers vs journalists and the truth is, I’m kinda tired of this talk. This is similar to – albeit with smaller economic repercussions – the of Microsoft against Linux. Bloggers have gone religious about this.

Political bloggers like to think that they’re on a mission, distinctively involved with the Movement. The adrenaline of the fringe, up against the mighty enterprise of Establishment and Greed Corp. This fuels them with zeal equivalent to those of the Jedi Council. They’re probably right about half the time. There are signs that people actually read blogs and duly influenced.

Except in Indonesia, they’re going up against Jakarta Post.
In Star Wars terms, this flagship national English paper is the equivalent of a bad render scene reject that doesn’t make it to DVD extras. It’s amusing that some members of the English reading community take this paper seriously. I’ve a feeling that dissecting a bad paper with 35,000 circulation in a country of 220m people will not earn you the Pulitzer anytime soon. Especially not one with most of it’s content – even letters, translated. Don’t you realize that reading Jakarta Post isn’t like reading a real newspaper, let alone reading a blog that’s quoting Jakarta Post out of context?

There was a time when Tempo was worth reading. The threshold of Soeharto’s flagrant mastery of subtle propaganda. There was a time when Goenawan’s was a sobering voice amid the noise of New Order press. The last week before Tempo was martyred, he blacked out the entire page of his column to signal the Beginning of the End.
Nice touch, cult appeal several notches up.
Resurrected four years after, Tempo is a magazine succumbing away to its fading legacy. The quality tanked once they have competition and they’re barely surviving as it is.

Then the time when detik.com was the fountain of youth. It epitomes the wildly dynamic revolution in progress, reform in the age of the Internet. These days, it’s a bad GIF gore-fest with insane navigation and no RSS feed.

The rest of the participating cast in the First Amendment orgy are the usual suspects of babes with boobs and fashion franchises. And don’t even get me started on TV. It was the Forbidden Fruit syndrome. Soon everyone was evicted. Indonesian media reached it’s peak of mediocrity.
It’s an embarrassingly acceptable fact that as a member of the Indonesian middle class proper, you will need to at least read one foreign publication to effectively digest the World.

Then, very late to the party, come the bloggers blessed with the infinite wisdom to sort these out.

Suffice to say that if you were to make sense of the media scene these days you arrive at mayhem in galactical proportion.

I can go on why the local media isn’t worth reading most of the time, but I won’t.

I will tell you instead why it is.

Because bloggers are worse. Most bloggers* are hyperlink addicts that consider broken link to yesterday’s Post as the height of their pretend journalistic career.

They chop and dissect half baked arguments meshed with out of context quotes to present the facts after the idea. Present an argument by collecting agreeable flimsy facts: classic, garden variety idiot-in-a-clown-costume syndrome.

Like Indoesia Matters for example. Consistently manic with their islamo-phobia, these guys are wholesale bullshit producer, spin doctors on Viagra that will humble Joseph Goebbles. Ku Klux Klan with basic typographic skills and high on copyright infringements. While I am never certain on what interests these quasi-reporters might have by maintaining a mediocre blog dissing a third world country with their Ultra Right rubbish, it is indeed an exemplary sample of the virtue of the Internet. Even the worst of us has a place. I have to at least giving them credit that for spin doctors, these folks are pretty good.

Only they couldn’t even get a grammatically correct title.

Heck, on the Internet everybody get their Google cache after 15 minutes.

This is exactly why we continue to read real newspaper and why blogs will continue to be questioned for their credibility. You need someone to be liable beyond Internet JPEGs. Despite being so boringly mediocre, Jakarta Post at least makes an effort to be accurate and does produce their occasional gems of reporting. Most importantly, they are accountable, even when they’re bad. And so are the rest of them.

The print media is here to stay.
Blogs will not chase newspapers away because you will need someone to sort out the real stuff. If anything, it’s because you’ve no time to do it yourself.

Real papers have journalists and report on what things are happening on the ground. If anything at all, they have real people that talk to other real people out there.
Literate bigots running on second hand facts and half sentence translations* aren’t journalists: they’re still only literate bigots, if a little fancier than others.

Bloggers can probably make a difference by paying more attention on what they’re quoting and hyperlinking. I take a different path here to Fatih, I don’t ask them to bare all, I only ask them to be accountable for what rubbish they produce.

Write what you know best and bullshit convincingly on the rest if you must. Take basic lesson in statistics and math. Very basic. Take pride in what you do and at least try to hold your arguments with some conviction. Be smart, try to know what you talk about and failing that, at least try to be honest.

Then probably you can make a difference.

Otherwise, you might as well shut the fuck up and stop pretending like you’re a Pulitzer candidate. This isn’t some underground movement against the evil empire no more. Those days were long gone. Write about your lousy ex or something. Run online dating service, you guys sound like you need one.

And for the people on the proper media payroll, for the Love of God, wake up!!!
It’s time for papers like Jakarta Post to take their job seriously: because even if you don't, there are people out there who took your mistranslations for real.
You’d want to run a real paper. Stop being so complacent, you’ve responsibility to the public and some day, people will probably demand that you do.
Remember the scene where Uma Thurman asked her toe to wiggle? Now is the time.
You don’t want these clowns to take your job!!





*I’m only talking of Indonesian political bloggers out there, there’re about two of them. And if any of you so called experts on Indonesian Matters – perhaps the celebrated mannequin webmaster himself - took offence to this post, by all means, drop me a comment, I’ll be happy to amuse you further.

**since Jakarta Post copy paste their editorials and translate their reporting, re-blogging Jakarta Post is like recycling toilet papers twice. You’re not really doing that much good.