Political Preference of Media Owner, Power Abuse, and Bias (Case on Private Televisions in Indonesia)

Kartinawati, Erwin and Pawito, Pawito and Warto, Warto and Wijaya, Mahendra and Purwasito, Andrik (2020) Political Preference of Media Owner, Power Abuse, and Bias (Case on Private Televisions in Indonesia). PalArch's Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology, 17 (7). pp. 6907-6917. ISSN 1567-214X

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Abstract

Mass media behavior in Indonesia has changed since the 2014 presidential election. The media openly has shown partiality to one candidate and or became part of a support group. The media has been used as an arena to gain and support power, become a mouthpiece, and a propaganda tool for stakeholders. The political preferences of media owners are one of the causes. The 2014 presidential election as a starting point of change. Even in the 2019 presidential elections, the media was the same, especially on private televisions. This paper explored how the news was used as a battlefield in competing for public discourse to gain power during general elections and its impacts. The position of media owner who was also the leader of a political party was vulnerable to abuse of media power, which in turn had consequences for the media content (bias). The forms of abuse of media power were the use of news as a tool to gain public legitimacy, to attack and defeat one another, and to build the image of media owners and groups. Because the news had been constructed for self and group interests, the next consequence that occurs was bias in content. Media content bias was related to the selection of facts into news, selection of sources, placement of news, and how to present a fact to become news to the public. The results of the study were obtained by document observation of private television news broadcast, Metro TV and TV One during the 2014 presidential election, and also interviewed the media actors.

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