The Role of Media Education Guarding National Policies Without a Hoax For the Realization of Forward Indonesia
By: Rohman Fahrozi) *
In the digital era like now, almost all people can surf through the internet which is flooded with information with a variety of opinions, data, and diverse information, sometimes even status on social media can be a horrendous news. Ironically, the variety of available information is not infrequently packaged into negative content which is feared to cause polemics that threaten the integrity of the nation.
The Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Culture (Menko PMK) Muhadjir Effendy said that one of the keys to the success of Indonesia’s development in the digital era was to create positive content that could influence changes in people’s behavior towards better conditions.
“Humans are essentially learning. Learning to change behavior also requires information intake so that people can think and determine attitudes. If the President’s term is emigrated, change the attitude of behavior from negative to positive or from positive to more positive,” said Kemenko PMK.
Nevertheless Muhadjir admitted that influencing the community through positive content was not easy. The tendency of negative content, although not organized, has enormous power to be able to influence thinking and trigger reactive actions from the public. An information is presented quickly and become viral on social media, shared by thousands of accounts or commonly known as netizens, it is known that the information is incorrect and leads a certain leader or group to be bad. But unfortunately, the clarification of the wrong information is actually quiet.
This condition is where the contribution of all components of the nation, especially the media, is demanded to play a large role in guarding information disclosure in the context of a constitutional and civilized democracy. The media must be at the forefront of providing literacy and enlightenment education to the public so that the space for participation in public opinion must be done wisely, smartly and with dignity and enlightenment.
The media should be used as the eyes and ears of the public in drawing conclusions based on information from credible media sources, which are truly objective and not manipulative or even defamatory information. For this reason, this is the importance of the role of the media as an instrument of civic education to consistently report and provide literacy and education to the public by presenting news that encourages common sense in the community to reject and not be provoked by various disinformation efforts that divide nationalism or hinder national development. The media must provide optimism in its reporting in order to succeed the national agenda which is already going well and is praised by other nations.
) * Communication Science Students / Independent Literacy Volunteers
