Talking Indonesia Podcast: Reporting COVID-19

Many foreign media outlets have been highly critical of the Indonesian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the Indonesian media, by contrast, seems far less inclined to question the government’s statistics and policy announcements. What explains this discrepancy in reporting? Are Indonesian journalists self-censoring because the space for dissent is shrinking in Indonesia? Are foreign journalists exaggerating the extent of the crisis?

 In the latest episode of Talking Indonesia, Dr. Dirk Tomsa discusses these and other questions with Febriana Firdaus, an Indonesian freelance journalist based in Bali, and Max Walden, a reporter and producer with the ABC Asia Pacific Newsroom in Melbourne and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s Asian Law Centre.

Click here to listen.