the freedom of press is now threatened again..

The freedom of press is now endangered again…

After the reformation movement in 1998, the press started to find its way to use the right of speech through UU PERS no. 40 1999. The struggle and blood of students and people against the tyranny finally brought Indonesia to the new democracy era in which people can freely demonstrate their opinion and argument without the fear of being jailed. The collapse of Soeharto and his new order open the chance of freedom press to express the opinion and to inform people.
But now the freedom of press is threatened again. The head of district police in South Sulawesi, Sisno Adiwinoto has tried to curb the people’s right to perform a critic of one phenomenon. It started with Sisno’s statement that everyone can criminalize the journalist for any news or report that give disadvantages without the mechanism of right of clarification or correction. For journalist, this statement is the justification of press criminalizes that means the imprisonment of the speech freedom or the effort to violate the democracy resulted by the blood of people in reformation battlefield. The case actually is public has the right to clarify or correct any report that offends public or not based on the real fact through the right of clarify and reader’s letter. Those have been ruled in the press act mentioned before. This statement is corresponded by the Journalist Coalition against Press Criminalizes by performing a demonstration to criticize the statement because it diminish the right of press that is ruled in the act. Surprisingly, this action stimulates the district police head to determine the coordinator of this coalition as a suspect of slandering and name blackened.
The differences are the characteristic of democracy. Everyone may have a different opinion on one certain thing. The most important thing is how we can manage the differences into one unity or how we can response the difference with the right way because everyone has a right to demonstrate what he believe. In this case, determination of Upi Asmarandhana as the coordinator of this coalition is the effort of person that abuse his authority to shut down the press activities that finally can run the position without any control from media. The function of media in the era of democracy is actually to inform the political actions of government or apparatus in running the poison that are handed to them. So, people will have a link to control the government and apparatus policies in order to keep on the right track in serving people. Without media, people will not have any information to keep an eye for government and apparatus. Therefore the freedom of speech need to be enforced for the seek of people’s right to get the true fact of their “servant”. Anybody who wants to restraint the freedom of media to report will means diminishing the link of controlling democracy.