MUSLIM MOTHERS AND INDONESIAN GOSSIP SHOWS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Abstract

Television gossip shows, popularly known as infotainment, have become a daily staple for Indonesian viewers for more than a decade. However, due to its nature of publicly airing the supposedly dirty laundry of Indonesian celebrities, infotainment has been under attack since its inception. Religious, professional and social organisations have publicly debated its content to little effect since infotainment remains one of the most watched television programmes. This article seeks to explore and analyse the infotainment landscape in Indonesian television and to examine the experiences of Indonesian Muslim mothers, who are exposed to infotainment, and how they negotiate these programmes in terms of their understanding of the Islamic prohibition of gossip.

Keywords:

• infotainment
• celebrity gossip shows
• Indonesia
• television
• Muslim mothers

Notes

¹ Sūrah (chapter) Hujurat (49) verses 12 in the Qur'an stipulates the condemnation of gossip in Islam for Muslims and its advice to avoid any forms of gossip (Yusuf Ali n.d.).

²The group started in June 2013. This group is part of my existing PhD ethnographic research on Muslim parenting, Indonesian media and piety in Central Java, Indonesia, which entails online and offline fieldwork. I invited Muslim mothers who are ‘friends' with me on my personal Facebook account to participate in the closed group discussion and 12 women joined the group. My friends who agreed to participate are my childhood friends, my university friends back in Indonesia, a mother whom I met in New Zealand and has returned to Indonesia, and a friend of a friend I met here in Auckland. We share the same backgrounds as Muslim mothers and university graduates. I simultaneously position myself as a researcher, a friend and a mother. In this group we share and discuss our experiences with Indonesian media as Muslim mothers.

³Data of television history in Indonesia from Saroso (2011) differs slightly from Sen and Hill (2000).

⁴See Sudibyo and Patria (2013) for a comprehensive table of Indonesian conglomerates and their holdings of media businesses including television stations, radio stations, print and online media.

⁵It was an annual event where films made for television compete for awards. It is currently organised as part of the Indonesian Film Festival.

⁶Viewers' ratings conducted by Nielsen are known to be ‘scientifically’ questionable. There is no assurance whether it really measures audience viewing habits due to the nature of its measurement. It does not gauge viewers' opinions on television programmes and commercials. As Butler (2009: 392) explains ‘Nielsen data are exclusively quantitative measurements, indicating how many viewers watch and who they are by aggregating them into demographic groups'. In Indonesia, Nielsen gathers its data from ten different cities including three major cities, namely Jakarta, Surabaya and Medan (Nielsen 2010). However, their sample is usually small. In Indonesia its sample includes 2,423 television households (Nielsen 2011). In spite of their limitations, Nielsen data is still widely used for advertising purposes as the exchange rate by which advertisers buy airtime for airing their commercials on certain television shows (Butler 2009; Coutas 2008).

⁷A terrestrial television channel called NET, launched in May 2013, also screens a gossip show called Entertainment News. It is aired from Monday to Friday at 9am, 11am, 6pm and 11pm and on Saturday and Sunday at 11am. Besides broadcasting information on Indonesian celebrities, it also covers overseas celebrities. NET's content is also available on YouTube and social media platforms. Other national televisions like TVRI, TV ONE and Metro TV have no infotainment programmes. Indonesia also hosts numerous local and network television channels throughout the country.

⁸Yulianto (2008) citing Santoso (2005) states that in 2006 there were more than 30 separate infotainment programmes on all 13 television stations.

⁹This is true for many celebrity gossip shows except Infotemen (basically meaning information from friends (temen) on Trans TV which combines the concept of a talk show and infotainment. It claims to be an infotainment show with almost accurate information because of its close relationship with celebrities. However, its talk show seems to dominate the infotainment aspect of its format and the overall package deviates from most infotainment shows in Indonesia (see YouTube 2013b).

¹⁰Yulianto (2008) states that with previously female only presenters, since 2006 the trend for many television networks has been to include male infotainment presenters.

¹¹A saying made famous by Andy Warhol more than 40 years ago which is even applicable today (Devlin 2010; van Krieken 2012).

¹²Indonesian journalism code of ethics consists of 11 articles which include respecting the privacy of the informants, providing accurate and fair news, and avoiding untrue, defaming and sensual news and pictures (Dewan Pers 2011).

¹³Bintang mentioned one of the most watched scandals in infotainment in 2010, which involved Luna Maya, an actress and singer, and Nazriel Irham of a pop band called Peter Pan who is better known as Ariel. Their sex video went viral on the Internet and their popularity rocketed for all the wrong reasons (Jakarta Globe, 26 July 2012). Ariel was detained for distributing pornographic material while Luna lost her lucrative advertising endorsement and TV appearances literally overnight (Jakarta Globe, 11 January 2011). Bintang argued that Ariel's prosecution was necessary to uphold the law. Yet similar exposures of sexual encounters on the Internet involving politicians are not prosecuted (Aspinall 2014).

¹⁴RCTI with its Seputar Indonesia (About Indonesia) news programme and SCTV with its Liputan6 (Coverage 6) news segment involve soft news or soft features which are stated in their programme content (see <http://www.rcti.tv/programs/view/19/seputar-indonesia-pagi> and <http://video.liputan6.com/>).

¹⁵Indonesian language is used in the discussions, because it is the first language of all participants and the researcher. To protect the identity of participants I use pseudonyms for the participants and due to powerful search engines, such as Google, I left out the original Indonesian language version of their responses and use the translation of the texts in English so that it cannot be traced back to the original page on Facebook (see Markham and Buchanan 2012).

¹⁶Calvert (2000) classifies the mediated voyeurism in four categories, namely video vérité voyeurism, reconstruction voyeurism, tell-all/show-all voyeurism, and sexual voyeurism. Watching gossip shows can be categorised as tell-all/show-all voyeurism.

¹⁷Kick Andy is a talk show broadcast by Metro TV. Its guests include individuals from well known celebrities to ordinary people.

¹⁸She referred to a kidnapping case involving a step daughter of a dangdut singer named Nassar (YouTube 2013a). Some people believed that she was kidnapped because Nassar enjoyed showing off his wealth publicly (YouTube 2012).

¹⁹Yulanto (2008) finds that women and men in Jakarta and Yogyakarta use the information they obtained from infotainment to build and maintain their social network.

²⁰Asmirandah, a Muslim actress, and her boyfriend Jonas Rivanno ‘Vanno’ Watimena, a Christian actor hit the headlines when they both claimed to have married in Depok, West Java, since it is impossible for a couple with different religions to be married in Indonesia. This is due to a regulation issued in 1974 stating that a marriage is deemed valid only if it is conducted under legal procedures of each belief and religion. Since NU issued a fatwa in 1989 based on the ruling stated in the Qur'an (Surat Al-Baqarah 2:221), and in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 7:3) for people of different religions to be united in marriage, it is forbidden in Indonesia for a mixed religion couple to be married (Republika, 1 May 2010). It was reported that Vanno converted to Islam but he then claimed that the ‘news' on his conversion was false. Their marriage was later annulled because it was proven that Vanno had not converted to Islam when he married Asmirandah (YouTube 2013c). The latest ‘news' suggests Asmirandah has converted to Christianity, although such news has yet to be confirmed (Jakarta Post, 20 December 2013). 

Additional information

Hanny Savitri Hartono is pursuing her PhD in Social Anthropology at Massey University, New Zealand. Her current research focuses on Muslim mothers, parenting, piety and Indonesian media.