EYE ON ETHICS

In Indonesia, an election campaign for public office can turn a journalist from observer to campaigner, from reporter to candidate.
One chief editor of a Jakarta-based newspaper ran for a seat in the House of Representatives in the April 2009 general election. He came under criticism for not vacating his editorship during his campaign. He did so after securing his seat in the national legislature.

“We can’t deny a citizen’s political right, including journalists, to run for public office. So we call on journalists who run for office to take a leave of absence and forego any news reporting to prevent bias and partisanship,” said Margiyono, advocacy coordinator of Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists, AJI.

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MYANMAR, also known as Burma to the western world, is scheduled to have its first national elections for parliament and local positions this year.

The military junta, in absolute control of the nation of 50 million since 1962, had promised last year to call the elections this year but nobody in and outside Myanmar knows for sure when exactly.

The dilemma of reporters is how to cover the process vigorously, independently when the rules are mostly unknown to the voters, candidates and the press, and the process under absolute control of the junta.

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Published on May-June 2010 issue of PJR Reports.

Filipinos awaited the first automated elections in the country with understandable doubt and uncertainty, if not widespread and genuine fear. It had taken four years of heated legislative battle to establish the basis in law for automation (Election Modernization Act or Republic Act 8436). The Commission on Elections’ (COMELEC) implementation was fraught with scandal and controversy at different stages, and up to the eve of election day itself, many Filipinos were not sure whether the new process would work well enough to hold credible elections.

Experts and various groups raised questions central to the integrity of the system. As reported in the media, questions focused concern on, among others, the availability of transmission facilities for the electronic delivery of election results, physical security of the Precinct Count Optical Scanning (PCOS) machines including the Compact Flash (CF) cards, the installation of the source code, the breakdown of the PCOS machines, and not the least, the training, or the lack thereof, that would prepare technical personnel and members of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) and Board of Canvassers for the new system of voting.
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Published on May-June 2010 issue of PJR Reports

Technological tools were on full show on election day, adding more to talk about than just the election itself. Sure, the display of high-tech gizmos captured audience attention. But did they really help provide more information to help the public understand what was happening?

ABS-CBN 2 marked a milestone in media history when it reported election updates in real time with the help of new media and featured their reporters from different places using “virtual presence,” a feature of “augmented reality” from ORAD Hi Tec Systems. The network’s 103-inch touch screen monitor showed graphics that accompanied news as well as updates from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Multiply, and Youtube. They also had a “war room” filled with “Boto Mo, Ipatrol Mo” volunteers, staff from ABS-CBN.com, and a team from Systems and Technology Institute (STI) which did a parallel count.
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Published on May-June Issue of the PJR Reports
By John Reiner M. Antiquerra and Rupert Francis D. Mangilit

An April 2010 report from Pulse Asia said that nearly half of the Filipino electorate would be going to the polling precincts unaware of the party-list system. But the media still covered the party-list elections least.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR)’s monitor for the periods of April 12 to 16 and April 19 to 23 showed that only 25 of 723 television reports were on the party-list elections. What was worse was that only four of the 187 party-list groups were the subjects of these reports. Radio coverage was not good news, either, as the CMFR monitor for radio showed only 6 of the 77 reports are on the party-list groups.
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