Rethinking Mass Media as the Fourth Pillar of Democracy in Indonesia
Karman (a*), Bambang Mudjiyanto (a)

a : Ministry of Communications and Informatics of RI

Abstract

Indonesia is a country adopting democracy. It gets support not only from the executive, legislative, and judicial institutions, but also mass media. Many scholars argue mass media as the fourth pillar of democracy. However, the process of communication through mass media in Indonesia get constraint resulting from media structure dan the culture of audience consuming information. This paper argues that mass media is not democracy fourth pillar anymore. To support our argument, we collected data from research papers, document regarding structure of Mass media in Indonesia today, and media mogul involvement in politics. We find that mass media in Indonesia become a part of political oligarchy. It gives an implication to homogeneity of news-making. Mass media became political interest extension rather than democracy one. In contrast, by observing political activities on new media (Twitter, websites), we find that publics use them to express political activism during democracy process (presidential election 2019) in Indonesia. We conclude that democracy needs the media as its pillar. However, the pillar is not reduced to ^mass media^. It is one of many species from genus of media. We maintain pillar of democracy is media, instead of mass media.

Keywords: media massa- democracy- Indonesia presidential election 2019

Topic: Social Science and Humanities