World News Coverage
Oct 30th, 2008, in News, by Patung
How much coverage Indonesia gets in the major newspapers of the world, like the New York Times.
Quality & Quantity
The New York Times, on average about a few times a month it seems, publishes fairly in depth and well-researched news stories about Indonesia on social and political topics likely to be familiar to readers of this site (RSS feed), and maintains a useful portal page on the country here.
From 2000 to the present the New York Times has published 500 odd articles about Indonesia, and below is an interactive, comparative look at the number of articles about each of the 192 member states of the United Nations that have appeared in the New York Times in the same time frame.
Static version of above (if your browser doesn’t have Java installed):
A French website, L’Observatoire des médias, looks at the coverage of countries in the world (in 2007) in some major French and British newspapers, as well as the New York Times, in a less user friendly way, with a heat map, with Indonesia not seeming to figure to any great extent in most of them.
Click the red dots next to newspaper names to activate.
66 Comments on “World News Coverage”
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Achmad Sudarsono says:
Patung,
Might be your best article every.
How’d you put the map together ?
Very, very interesting.
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btw — AAB & PN — please don’t try to f*ck up this thread, ok ?
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Purba Negoro says:
Achmad-
with all due respect- go pluck yourself dry.
Pluck you, mother plucker!Yes- I am referring to the haunting yet throughly erotic hip-thrusting gyrations of your kecapi-esque celempung strumming of your ukelele tuned to pelog Achmad.
Yes- Indonesia is finally out of the news. Those annoying whiny NGO’s have finally been muzzled or expelled- since we followed Mr Putin’s brilliant advice and force them to surrender all banking documents.
This separates the truly humanitarian ones such as Oxfam from the provocateur manure spreaders- like ETAN or Solidamor etc.Timdog:
The Guardian? Internationalist?Oh- that pink rag from Manchester- The Manchester (Workers) Guardian.
I think you really mean: International Workers Socialist and angst-ridden, hand-wringing middle-class moral pandering material par non compaire?
If you hug enough hoodies, yardies, blacks and illegal immigrants – apparently you get it free for a week.
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timdog says:
PN – what you or I may think of the qualities or politics of the Guardian had nothing to do with it (though incidentally, it hasn’t been from Manchester for decades, and you should probably make up your mind whether it’s a socialist workers’ rag, or the favoured organ of the indulgent middle classes – can’t have it both ways).
For my purposes all that mattered was that, among British newspapers, it is “highbrow” (though “highbrow newspaper” is something of an oxymoron in the UK these days), has a comparatively high volume of foreign news, and is, in as much as such things have any relevence in the UK now, at the “left” side of the mainstream political spectrum.
I could equally have chosen the Independent, which also concerns itself with international issues, and is generally seen as “liberal”, though is far more confused about its own politics than the Guardian. Its archive was less user-friendly though.
Incidentally, the Daily Mail, almost certainly the most powerful paper in the UK (and politically and socially everything that the Guardian is not), and a publication renowned for its Britain-centric, insular outlook and avoidance of foreign news actually gave almost as much coverage to Indonesia as the Guardian…
It threw up 5 Indonesia stories in the four months from June to October.
They were as follows:The Bali bombers and their “chilling warning”;
The 23 dead in Pasuruan again (“The moment 23 Muslims were crushed to death”);
An old, old, old story from over a decade ago about a Sumatran mass-murdering dukun, dug out to mark his recent execution;
“ALONE ON DRAGON ISLAND!!!!!” The missing British tourists in Komodo;
And “Indonesian Police arrest Muslim militants over bloody attacks” – our friends from the FPI after their little street party in Jakarta…
Any interpretations of the nature of the coverage there?
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Hell, I might as well give you the five stories from the Sun while I’m at it…
1. “Brit missing in Indonesia” – the west Java plane crash
2. “Brit divers swept out to sea” (“shark infested waters”, “jurassic park-style monster lizards”, “ferocious flesh-eating Komodo dragons… notorious for charging aggressively at people” Yaaaaaawwwwwn)
3. “Tree man has bark growths ops” – Look at the freak! Look at the freak! Look at his warts!
4. “Massage parlours lock up” Mr Patung covered this one – the padlocked masseuses in Batu.
5. “Indonesia to block YouTube” – From back in April, Fitna, blahblahblah…
Actually, considering it was the Sun, I thought they did rather well for themselves…
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lgun says:
Good Riddance.
As we know what the press would like to cover for their news, it bad news. To them bad news is “Good News”, so, the less news they have about Indonesia the better we are.
Beside, Western Press were having a tendency to create chaotic news, to ‘adu domba’.
And their reader (western readers of course), are known to laugh at other people misery, especially third world nation. Ya know, so they can forgot their own misery. -
they’re not covering Indonesia because they’re cutting back on foreign news budgets. it’s expensive sending people out here.
PN — i did say please.
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Once again, Mr. Patoengs, very nice piece. Good lateral thinking. I checked the metrics on Indonesia coverage once and it peaked at the tsunami. Sad thing is Indonesia is such an amazing lab for global issues. But yes, Indonesaphiles and Indonesians have to wake up (for those who haven’t), and realize: they don’t give a sh*t.
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Achamd – foreign correspondents are almost a thing of the past these days…
Most international coverage comes from a very, very limited number of sources – basically the two big international wire agencies Associated Press and Reuters (and also, to a lesser extent, Agence France Press).
Look at any international story in any newspaper in any country (including the Indonesian Language press in Indonesia) and often as not you’ll see the letters AP, AFP, or Reuters next to it…Even if the story has a byline by a staff writer, chances are that they have simply re-written agency copy.
Of the stories I mentioned above all but the Guardian’s story on homeless Aceh villagers, and the various pieces on the missing divers were pure agency copy. The pieces in the Guardian and the Mail on the 23 deaths were indistinguishable (though the respective papers’ rationales for carrying the story may have been very different); likewise the Sun’s and the Guardian’s coverage of the plane crash.
Sometimes they were disguised with a staff writer’s byline, but all it took was to google one of the quotes to discover that the same story with the same quotes and lines, had appeared everywhere from The Turkish Daily News to the Sydney Morning Herald…AP and Reuters both have Jakarta bureaux; basically, all of the world’s coverage of Indonesia – with the exception of the occasional specialist issue – comes from these two small bureaux…
The last correspondents representing British media outlets in Indonesia are from the BBC and the Financial Times. The BBC stuff coming out of the country appears almost only on the website and the World Service; the FT stuff usually appears only in the Asian Edition of that paper…My personal theory on why Indonesia – a vast and potentially significant country – has generally been abandoned by the world media is not so much that they “can’t give a sh*t”, than that Indonesia lies outside all points of reference that would make it newsworthy.
How to package Indonesia? How to make a story coming out of Indonesia make sense to a casual reader without detailed background knowledge?
It’s almost impossible.
For most people “Indonesia” defies the kind of instant (inaccurate) imaginings that allow news consumers at least to think they have a grip on what, say, “India”, “Australia”, or “Iraq” represents when they read a story about those places,. Therefore for most editors selecting stories, a piece on the wire about “Indonesia” exists in a vacuum and will mean nothing to their readers…Even when it comes to “Islam”, which ought, “post 9/11” to give Indonesia at least some global new currency, the country falls down. Indonesians don’t look much like stereotypical Muslims, don’t speak like them, don’t – generally – behave much like them. Hell, the country doesn’t even fit into physical imaginings of the Islamic world – rice terraces? Jungles??? Beaches??? Where the f*ck’s the desert????
Even its status as “most populous Muslim nation” doesn’t manage to bump it up the news value stakes…In short, Indonesia is incomprehensible, impenetrable, and thus of no value whatsoever in the stock market of global news….
An interesting flipside of this is China – a country which is probably every bit as impenetrable and incomprehensible, but which now has a perceived “importance”. Witness the mad global scrabble of news outlets as they try to cover China as much as possible, try to suck as much news out of it as possible, despite the howling absence of context, depth or background… It all has the feel of a lazy student frantically trying to cram in their study in the early hours of a coffee-fueled morning, hours before their final exam…
Should Indonesia – for positive or negative reasons – come lurching up to undeniable prominence at some point in the future, you’ll see global news responding in the same panicked way…
If you’re interested in all this sort of crap, try googling “Galtung and Ruge” and “news values” for more…
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Shucks Achmad, I can’t claim the credit for that NYT data, I just played around with a dataset created by a blogger called ‘agnostic’ at the Gene Expression blog, he did the hard slog of searching on the countries names – the dataset is here – http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/data/SkWN8RsOtha6_gUamGhCR2~, somebody also created a world map version of it which is good as well.
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But are we beating Singapura and Maling-sya?
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I’m agree with Mr. Purbo that Indonesia beats singapr & malingsia in news. Unfortunately, it only happens in bad news.
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Berlian Biru says:
Don’t they have the Times or Daily Telegraph in your world timdog?
I think the main reason that Indonesia doesn’t feature so much is that often the name “Indonesia” is never actually inserted into articles that refer to this nation.
Thus I read an article in the Daily Telegraph only yesterday which discussed the fact that analysis of the mud from the Tsunami indicated that there had been many previous similar such events, the article referred to researchers in “Thailand and Sumatra”, the term “Indonesia” featured nowhere in the article, I recall something similar earlier this year when a species of antelope long thought extinct was reported to have been discovered, once again in “Sumatra”.
The missing British divers were frequently reported as being found in “Komodo, the Dragon Island”, which nation Komodo belonged to was left entirely out of many of the reports. The wreck of a Royal Navy ship sunk in the early part of WWII was recently located “off the coast of Java”, people enjoy holidays in “the resort island of Bali”, climbers go missing “in the jungles of Kalimantan”.
I have seen this happen so often I can only come to the conclusion that it is deliberate policy by editors dealing with ‘exotic’ stories who somehow believe that the term “Indonesia” should only be used when reporting political stories or major news events like bombs and earthquakes thus contributing to the generally negative perception of Indonesia held by many people around the world.
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Patrick says:
If Indonesia wants to know why or why not its newsworthy sees how much impact the country has upon the world stage? Ask if the news releases coming out of Indonesia are important on a local, regional or global scale?
I can tell you from my own personal experience (An American experience) there has been much more coverage of Indonesia because of three events; 1. 9-11, 2. the tsunami, and the Bali bomber attack. The Aceh province draws attention as well but to a much lesser degree except when we see negative impact stories on Sharia Law with punishments deemed barbaric by Western standards. As you can see all these stories are definitively negative impact stories concerning the country but we did receive some coverage of human-interest stories from Aceh. You might ask why 9/11 and I will tell you the interest here in America is due because Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world so the USA media tends to focus on Islam in Indonesia and the potential militancy of the people as those types of stories draws the attention of the viewers.
The positive stories of Indonesia are usually found in the travel sections of newspapers and magazines such as the beauty of places like Bali or Lombok and the good bargains to be found in hotels etc., For the most part the vast majority of Americans have little or no idea who or what the Indonesian people are about and unfortunately, they are not getting the real picture of that from their media. The Indonesian embassy in the United States is very low keyed so there is scant news coverage on any statements their spokesman or ambassador might make on any issue involving Indonesia.
I believe if Indonesians want to show a positive face to the world than they need to do several things to change that image: 1. Make a huge marketing effort to selected Western countries to project Indonesia as an exciting, friendly, exotic, beautiful, historical, vast, diversified place to visit and do business. 2. An internal campaign is needed to get Indonesian people to feel good and proud of their country and heritage. This campaign would also involve making visitors to the country feel very welcomed from the moment that they arrive to the moment they leave and yes that means stopping the “Hey Mister” harassment! This kind of thing could be done with TV commercial, documentaries, newspaper adds, billboards etc. Check out “Malaysia truly Asia” as an example. (I just know you hate that PN.) 3. Develop serious home grown journalists and news people that will write and tell stories that are judged by outsiders to be credible and news worthy so that they can offer readership worldwide a uniquely Indonesian perspective on events as they happen inside or outside their country. The hope being that their stories will be carried by wire services and news feeds worldwide.
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Patrick,
marketing would only make a minor difference.
you’re all forgetting how the entire profession of foreign correspondent is an endangered species.
In terms of long-term trends,
no, Indonesia does nothave a minor effect on the outside world.
One factoid alone — 15 % of Japan’s energy comes from here.
But seriously Patrick, for all the great things about America, having a healthy interest in the outside world, you guys don’t. Ask any worldly and educated American about her countryfolk’s worldiness.
Look at the Republican Veep candidate.
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@ Achmad – Ya I would agree many Americans have an extremely limited view of the world outside and most are in the dark concerning Indonesia. I know and you know that Indonesia is extremely important to the world economy but do people outside of Indonesia know it? That’s where good marketing is indeed effective. Look at the UAE for an example as most Americans could not find it on a map barely a few years ago but now after allot of positive press and marketing it’s no longer UAE who?
I am not forgetting so much about foreign correspondents as I am encouraging qualified home grown correspondents to replace them. Good jobs for Indonesians my friend!Do you think Joe Biden is any better? GASP!
Anyway who votes for vice-presidents?
Whoever is elected may he have good health and a long life! :>) -
Berlian Biru – of course the Telegraph and Times exist in my world – it was merely a sample across the spectrum (Sun-Mail-Guardian).
There’s also a difference between stories about Indonesia and stories containing a secondary reference to Indonesia…
I do think your point about reference to “Sumatra” and “Bali” etc has some merit, though I just tried the archive search on the Guardian again (only because it’s got the most usable archive and that which you have the most control over the search criteria). There were plenty of secondary references (“Bali bomb” in general terrorism pieces with no other reference to Indonesia; “…the Asian Tsunami which hit Thailand, Sumatra and Sri Lanka in 2004…” and so on), but there were no real news stories about Indonesia mentioning “Bali” or “Sumatra” that didn’t also mention Indonesia…
A quick check of the Sun and the Mail showed the same thing.I do though, like I said, think your point on this has merit, but probably is more important in terms of the conciousness of the reader than the original coverage…
And yes, there was some hilarious stuff on the “divers marooned on dragon island”… There were dragons “three metres tall“, “spitting poison”, and, as previously mentioned, lots of “shark infested waters” (when was the last shark attack in Indonesia?).
The divers were also “Missing off Bali” – well, okay, about 200 miles “off Bali”…Patrick – Indonesia recieves so little coverage, not so much because it “has little impact” than because it is so incomprehensible. There are other places that have no more impact, but which recieve more coverage – because they make more sense to readers…
I tried to outline something of these issues in my earlier post. -
And I thought people keep buying the Sun for their page 3 naked girls?
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Dammit – hit post before I meant to… I continue…
There are various factors that come into play when news is selected.
A key one is “Abiguity”: an ambiguous story – that is, one where the issues are not black and white – is unlikely to be carried because it will be hard for readers to make sense of. Indonesia is nothing if not ambiguous.
Another is “Continuity” – that is, the more a country or a particular story is covered, the more likely it is to continue being covered, precisely because the more it is covered the less “ambiguous” it becomes.
The flip side of this is a Catch 22 vortex of non-coverage: if no one has covered Indonesian politics for a decade, no one’s going to start doing so now because non af the details, presonalities, issues will have any meaning to the casual reader.There has probably been more coverage in the UK of the recent election in the Maldives – the Maldives for chrissake! – than there has been of Indonesian politics in the last 5 years…
No one could argue that the Maldives have more impact than Indonesia, but when it comes to news values, the story was much less “ambiguous”. It’s a tiny country; there hadn’t been a democratic election before, so the story could – rightly or wrongly – be packaged in unambiguous fashion (“First elections see new government in Maldives”). Also, say “Maldives” to the average Briton and they’ll probably have an instant image; say Indonesia and they’ll probably have to wrestle with all manner of vague and contradictory ideas…Another factor is something called “consonace” – how much a story fits with expectations. As I previously mentioned, Indonesia’s status as “biggest Muslim country” actually gets the country far less coverage than one would expect it to. This is because as a “Muslim country” Indonesia is rarely “consonant” as far as a news editor is concerned (Beaches? Rice terraces? Small, beardless, almond-eyed people in sarongs?)
Features on Bali in the travel supplements don’t count as “news”. Indonesia’s “positive image” and tourist marketing campaigns don’t have a great deal of relevance to news coverage – Iraq anyone?
That said, Malaysia and Singapore both piss all over Indonesia when it comes to tourist marketing – though that’s not what we’re talking about here…@Finally Woken – you’re probably right; unfortunately the paper does also carry some so-called “news”, so its readers get their world-view shaped even as the enjoy the page three girls…
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Timdog,
Sorry, mate, you’re out to lunch on a couple of points.
Factors determining coverage are first and foremost:
1. Does the country have a correspondent on site ?
(Did you do a metric search on Maldives election ? I’d be surprised if it had more than Indonesia).
Why might there be a correspondent in-country – that’s where the other things come into play.
Bottom line on Indonesia: it was only an English colony for four years (1814-1818 — correct me if I’m wrong). India has a place in the Western (British) imagination, plus it’s a whale. China has fascinated the West since before Marco Polo.
Indonesia falls somewhere between the cracks.
Interesting question: how does Indonesia coverage stack up in the Dutch press ?
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Achmad – well, yes, my line on the Maldives might have been somewhate hyperbolic, but it’s definitely recieved an enormously disproportionate level of coverage (in the UK) when compared to recent coverage Indonesia…
No British media outlet has a correspondent in the Maldives.
Having a correspondent in country is not the issue to the extent you suggest. This is mainly because the vast, vast majority of forein news comes not from the organisation’s own correspondent, but from the agencies – the copy is sometimes disguised under a staffer’s byline, but the research and interviews all comes from the wire… Reuters and AP have bureax in most Asian countries, very much including Indonesia.
Where foreign correspondents still exist, apart from in what are refered to in news analysis as “elite nations” (no prizes for guessing which these are), they usually cover an entire region. For example, the Guardian still has Ian MacKinnon in Bangkok covering the whole of Southeast Asia (and if you analyse his copy, you’ll still find that most of it – like the story of the Pasuruan deaths – is re-written agency stuff); there’s a freelance stringer called Andrew Drummond, also based in Bangkok, who does a lot of stuff on the region for British papers Britain.Both the BBC and the Financial Times have correspondents in Jakarta, but neither outlet carries noticibly more Indonesian news in their UK incarnations than those which don’t have someone based there – and that is because Indonesia is an ambiguous, inconsonant, incontinuous, non-elite, irrelevant place, in news terms…
Your question on Dutch coverage of Indonesia is interesting indeed…
If Lairedion is around perhaps he can enlighten us… -
“Berlian Biru – of course the Telegraph and Times exist in my world – it was merely a sample across the spectrum (Sun-Mail-Guardian).”
Yes a spectrum that had a right wing tabloid, a right wing mid range paper and a left wing broadsheet thus contributing to the idea that right wingers are knuckle dragging mouth breathers who can’t read fancy newspapers, despite the fact that in the UK two right of centre broadsheets massively outsell the two lefty broadsheets you seem to read. However that’s an entirely separate issue.
I take aboard your main thesis but I would contend that far from not being related to the issue at hand in fact tourist marketing and international press coverage are very closely linked. You yourself mentioned the Maldives, now why would the Maldives feature more than Indonesia in British media, with the exception of the bomb in the Indonesian tourist island of Bali? Could it be because Brits go on holiday to the Maldives and apart from Bali don’t holiday in Indonesia? It seems too much of a coincidence for it not to be so.
A year or so back I was in a UK travel agent sorting out airline tickets and I happened to pick up a Kuoni (I think) travel brochure for South East Asia. Each nation in the book had a separate section with their own colour coded margin for each country; thus you could flick to the blue section on Malaysia or the yellow section on Vietnam but in vain could I find the nation of Indonesia, there was certainly a purple section detailing the numerous attractions of “Bali” but Indonesia? No. Unique among the national tourist destinations of SE Asia Indonesia was not deemed worthy of a section under its own name.
These facts must surely be in some way connected.
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BB – The Mail was always going to be the middle one; absolutely it could have been the Telegraph at the top and the Mirror at the bottom – but then, surely, that would have given the very opposite of the impresssion which you complain about – which might have caused complaint from someone else.
The Telegraph is a good paper.
However, the Sun is, for what it is, better than the Mirror.
Anyway, as I said, it was merely a cross-section; politics had nothing to do with it, and the Guardian’s archive is simply more user-friendly than the Telegraph’s (I checked; I also checked that of the Independent – it was also less usable).Anyway, what I thought was particulary striking was that both the level and nature of coverage across the sample was very, very similar – with only the tiny Guardian story on homeless Aceh villagers (a miniscule story http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/15/tsunami2004.naturaldisasters – can you spot how it got into the Guardian?), and the Sun on Dede the Human Tree meeting any sort of pre-conceived notions about the outlook of those respective papers…
I imagine that had the Telegraph’s archive let me search it it would have thrown up a very similar selection of stories…Certainly, the Maldives’ tourism status has a role in what makes it “relevent” and “unambiguous” and, crucially, “imaginable” for British readers – as does the fact that it’s tiny, and therefore “comprehensible”, but it’s an indirect one…
Lebanon, for example, probably has more “continuity” of coverage in the UK press than Indonesia; seen much tourist advertising for Lebanon recently? (Incidentally, it does have great tourist potential, and Beirut is probably the hippest, coolest city between Rome and Sydeny, but that’s another story)… -
Aluang Anak Bayang says:
Re,
Achmad Sudarsono Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
btw — AAB & PN — please don’t try to f*ck up this thread, ok ?Telling Brown men what to do ain’t seksi, dig it, Misterrrr.
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Andy says:
Berlain Biru-thus you could flick to the blue section on Malaysia or the yellow section on Vietnam but in vain could I find the nation of Indonesia, there was certainly a purple section detailing the numerous attractions of “Bali” but Indonesia?
Now why is this Berlian. Let’s be honest here. I’ve been all over SE Asia and the other countries simply have more to offer. Malaysia for example has a capital city with state of the art public transport which westerners can understand and navigate on their first visit, most attractions within easy reach and great places to eat. Penang is only a few hours by bus and you travel on roads whicha re the equal to any western country. Thailand, I arrived in without any local knowledge, language or even a Lonely Planet book but the tourist bureaus were most helpful and within minutes I had a hotel and all transport confirmed for my entire trip. So simple. Compare that to Jakarta and most travellers who have never been there would end up hot, confused and frustrated with the added woe of a big hole in their wallet (from getting the city tour by the taxi companies) at the end of the day. And a guided tour would consist of nothing but shopping malls. Oh yeah and maybe a few shots of Monas. Bali is not the only place with good beaches but the only place which got it’s act together to provide great bars, restos and entertainment in one place. I went to Anyer and Carita a few years ago and they didn’t even know that beer was a beverage served cold. And the sand was covered in seaweed and rubbish.
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AAB-Telling Brown men what to do ain’t seksi, dig it, Misterrrr.
Thank you Achmad, you are at last coming to your senses and telling things the way they are. More of this from enlightened Indonesians and we might get the moronic scribblers off these pages for good.
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dragonwall says:
Hey Achmad
btw — AAB & PN — please don’t try to f*ck up this thread, ok ?
This is about the best part on the overall..nice..
and
I’m agree with Mr. Purbo that Indonesia beats singapr & malingsia in news. Unfortunately, it only happens in bad news.
Is because he always come up with the bad part and not the good but thinking it was the best.. Shit can’t even spell a country’s name right. Should consider himself rather than calling others maling..right!
I am going to pick and choose from these 2 sh*t and see what they come up with. We just watch. They will screw everything with things like monkey and kambing screwing into every holes.
And AS I don’t think you should say please to people like them otherwise they will be out of lunch holding on to their ego..and maling-sya. ha.ha.ha…
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Andy I don’t disagree with the fact that a travel agency trying to sell holidays is going to market “Bali” rather than “Indonesia” for very good reason. I was merely pointing to the, perhaps tenuous, link between this fact and the poor international reporting of nice, “human interest” stories about Indonesia which are usually subsumed under “exotic” tropical names like “Sumatra” and “Komodo” as opposed to all the godawful stuff that will always print “Indonesia” in big bold format nice and clearly and to the forefront.
Although on the subject of tourism whereas the Indonesian government does a hopeless job of marketing (how did that “Visit Indonesia 08” campaign work out, a roaring success was it?) you do wonder about people who were prepared to visit Cambodia and Vietnam when they were still largely hellish places and therefore create a new market where none previously existed put poor old Indonesia’s less well travelled routes can’t get an even break. I mean were Vietnamese resorts all that great when they started up, was the beer always served nicely chilled and the beaches always pristine?
And frankly I was never as bored as I was when I visited Penang for a month one weekend.
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BB-And frankly I was never as bored as I was when I visited Penang for a month one weekend.
You must have gone to all the wrong places.
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Yay!
Thanks Mr Patung… 🙂
I was looking at some stuff on this subject very recently…
Taking the Guardian, arguably Britain’s most internationalist newspaper, and searching its online archive, it was necessary to go all the way back to early June to get a quota of five separate Indonesia-focused news stories. They were, incidentally, as follows: the 23 idul Fitri deaths in Pasuruan; some homeless villagers in Aceh; something about Timor Leste and guilt; a West Java plane crash with a British citizen on board, and, the biggest story of the lot – some British tourists missing off Komodo…
You can have lots of fun with interpretations and readings of that…
And if I wanted to get a quota of five articles from the Guardian’s print edition, I would have had to go all the way back to the death of Suharto in February. That’s just five stories on the world’s fourth most populous nation in eight months…
And jeezus – you should have seen what the search of the database of the Murdoch-owned Sun threw up – suffice to say, Dede the Human Tree figured prominantly….
Doubtless I shall have more to add on this topic later…