JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY1
Introduction
The paper examines the level of public trust in journalism in Indonesia as a democratic
country and hence will argue that journalism can win back people trust. Most practitioners,
observes and scholars have noted startling signs of declining public trust in the media. Brants
(2013) notes that trust in media is seen as the “life blood of journalism’s role in and contribution
to people’s sense making, while “trust in the framework of Habermas ́ theory, can be interpreted
as the belief that an actor sticks to the validity claims that are the precondition for
communicative action: subjective/expressive truthfulness, normative rightness, and theoretical
truth.” (Müller, 2013, p. 81). This paper therefore relies on a research that suggests as other
social institutions journalism depends on trust while journalism also play an important role in
gaining public trust not only for itself but also for other parts of society (Blobaum,2014).
The paper analyzes the level of trust of the Indonesian people in the media. Based on a
survey conducted in 2017 by The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), public trust in
the media was found at an alarming rate at only 67% which is lower than the public trust in
Indonesian National Police at 71%, which institution has been notoriously corrupt. Despite the
closeness of journalistic media with the society, social media is increasingly gaining public trust
as the main source of information in Indonesia. The level of public trust in the press is influenced
by several factors. The first factor deals with the stronger society polarization due to political
conditions. The second one relates to the attitudes of media partisans determined by the interests
of media owners. The third factor is related to the weak literacy among Indonesian society. The
data released by Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that Indonesia
ranked 62 out of 70 countries in terms of literacy. To address this issue, this paper analyzes some
efforts that can be conducted to enhance the weak public trust in media.

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Journalism and Democracy (ISEAS) 2022

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