Ismira Lutfia – A recent survey suggests the country's five media regulatory bodies may not be as independent as they should be, given their dependence on state funding, but the bodies have dismissed any notion they are biased.

The survey, conducted by Yogyakarta-based PR2Media between July and December, focused on the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI), the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Body (BRTI), the Film Censorship Board (LSF), the Information Commission and the Press Council.

All five receive their funding from the government and employ staff members vetted by the ministries with which they work.

Bayu Wahyono, a PR2Media researcher, said on Tuesday that it could be argued that this arrangement was problematic because it made the media regulatory bodies accountable to the ministries and government.

While he conceded that the bodies needed steady funding to carry out their work, he said that ideally, they should sever all formal ties to the government. "They must completely detach themselves from any state support in order to be more independent and to abide by democratic principles," he said.

Puji Rianto, another PR2Media researcher, said the survey identified the Press Council as "relatively more independent" than the other bodies because its members came from the press and media community, thereby making it a self-regulatory body.

He said the Film Censorship Board, which was established during the heavy-handed rule of former strongman Suharto, still functioned with an "authoritarian spirit."

"It should be transformed into a new body whose job is not to censor but to classify films based on their target audiences," Puji said.

The film board's working partner is the Culture and Tourism Ministry, while the four other bodies work closely with the Communications and Information Technology Ministry.

Heru Sutadi, from the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Body, conceded his office was "somewhat of a proxy" for the Communications Ministry, serving mainly to carry out its duty to regulate, supervise and control the telecommunications sector in accordance with the 1999 Telecommunications Law.

Heru said the BRTI was established to ensure transparency, independence and fairness in telecommunications, based on a World Trade Organization agreement requiring member states to set up independent regulatory bodies for the sector.

Heru said the BRTI required that its members not be affiliated with telecommunications businesses, political parties or the armed forces, giving the body a degree of independence.

"While it may seem that we're not fully independent from the government, the truth is we're given limited resources to oversee a sector that is also a strategic state interest," he said.

"So one way or the other, the government has to take part in securing this interest."

Despite this, Heru said the BRTI's decisions were always made independent of the ministry, since public representation in the body outweighed government representation.

"But there are also plenty of examples of so-called independent bodies that turn out to be ineffective," he added.

With a bill on media and telematics convergence set for deliberation and possible passage this year, Heru said it was possible the regulatory body could become even more independent with a better sense of organizational duties and mandates.

"For the moment, we can only refer to the Telecommunications Law in doing our job," he said.

Dadang Rahmat Hidayat, chairman of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission, dismissed the idea that the KPI's impartiality could be compromised by the financial support it receives from the state.

"Our operational budget is determined by legislators and allocated from the state budget, otherwise where would we generate our income from? Surely we don't want to resort to getting funding from broadcasters," he said.

"We don't want to be so busy trying to raise funds that we don't have time for our main job."

Dadang said the true measure of the commission's effectiveness was not its dependence on state funding, but rather how it carried out its work.

"We work in the best interests of the people," he said. "You can always gauge how independent we are in carrying out our job by looking at the quality of the decisions we make – whether they're consistent with public interests or not."