Much of the media in Indonesia is bad quality, pornographic and unprofitable.

Aizirman Djusan, the head of the Human Resources Development and Study Department at the Communication and Information Ministry, said in Pontianak, West Kalimantan on May 30th that 70% of Indonesian media outlets and businesses were not viable businesses and produced poor quality content. He said about 580 of a total of 829 media companies were “unhealthy” and suffered from:

bad quality printing, small circulations, low number of advertisements, unprofessional reporters, and pornographic content.

Media companies in Indonesia were too profit-oriented, he said, and couldn’t care less about the quality of their staff or output.

Aizirman Djusan

After the fall of Suharto there had been an explosion in the number of media companies but much of the content was pornographic or focused on sensationalist news of violent crime.

The internet was a double edged sword, he said. People now had greater access to a wide variety of news sources but too many people just spend their online time in looking at porn sites.

Too many people are jointing.

Aizirman Djusan however said that is was important to ensure that unconnected villages had access to telephone and the internet. Only 6.6% of the Indonesian people currently had access to fixed-line phones, and around 21.9% to mobile phones. By 2015 Indonesia would become an “information society”, he hoped. antara