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A Journalist' Responsibility

This question haunted me since several weeks ago: how far do we, journalist, are responsible for things happening around us?

It all begin last September. The Alliance of Independent Journalist (AJI) Jakarta, where I sit as the chairman since last February, was asked to host a discussion to commemorate the fifth year anniversary of Munir's murder. As everybody probably well aware, this prominent human rights campaigner was poisoned to death on a Garuda flight to Amsterdam, September 7th five year ago.

Many journalists attended the discussion. We watched a documentary made by a friend of mine, former RCTI producer, Dhandy Dwi Laksono, and felt closer to Cak Munir. The film was great, it explained why we need to keep asking the question: who was behind this murder and keep pushing the police and attorney general to prosecute the mastermind.

However, the thing that disturbed me came during the discussion. Although it was not openly spoken during the Q and A session, I sense that many human rights activist who were there feel that the media, the journalist, has abandoned them, has forget this cause. "Yes, we got a lot of help and support from you all, but the work is not done yet, please come aboard again, lets do this once more, and push a litle more, so that everybody involve behind the curtain will be brought to justice."

How did we forget about Munir?

Well, we have many things on our plate. If you havent forget, we had the election, we had terrorism, we had corruption, we had other cases, everyday. So we did forget Munir.

How can we forget about Munir?

We can't. We actually can not and should not forget Munir.

But we just had so many other newsworthy issues to cover. We cannot fill our pages, our airwaves, with reports about Munir, if nothing happened just yet, can we? Some of us may ask: do we, journalist, have to also care about shaping an agenda, or do we just go with the flow, report anything that came in our way? Do we have time to reflect and then deliberately steer our reporting to a cause, to an issue, we know is important to the public? Are we free enough to that? Are we smart enough to that?

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