The Diverging Journalistic Role Perceptions of Indonesia’s Journalists and their Audiences

And the final presenter in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Fransiscus Xaverius Lilik Dwi Mardjianto, exploring journalistic roles in fact-checking in Indonesia. There is considerable social media use in Indonesia, especially via mobile phones, and a concentrated media market that is closely aligned within political interests; WhatsApp and Facebook are used to disseminate political content, and a considerable part of this can be mis- and disinformation, biased, or propaganda. This has also resulted in a low level (39%) of trust in the news media.

As a result, there are several fact-checking organisations, especially since the explosion of disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do journalists perform relevant journalistic roles when fact-checking such disinformation in Indonesia, then? How might we consider their own job conceptions and role performance, as well as societal expectations of them? This paper focusses especially on the second aspect.

Journalistic roles include monitoring, collaborative, interventionist, accommodative, and other roles, and in past surveys Indonesian journalists were especially highlighting their roles in reporting accurately, educating audiences, promoting tolerance and diversity, enabling public expression, and advocating for social change; being a detached observer, monitoring political leaders, and monitoring business activities were seen as considerably less important. Positive or critical portrayals of government were especially underemphasised.

This study complemented this information on journalists’ own role perceptions by asking audiences about their expectations of journalists, and it turned out that audiences had a much wider and more complex range of expectations – including the monitorial roles that journalists had found much less important. Audiences also agreed with journalists, however, that support for or antagonism towards the government were not important; they also saw influencing public opinion or political agenda-setting as unimportant.