A blueprint for future press legislation protecting every element of the media in the use of information technology

Abstract

Law Number 40 of 1999 on the Press has never once been amended, while the responsibility of digital platforms rests only in a presidential regulation and the use of artificial intelligence only in an institutional regulation. This study formulates future press legislation capable of protecting every element of the media in the use of information technology. It is normative legal research, descriptive, analytical and prescriptive in character, employing statutory, conceptual, comparative and case approaches, and analysed deductively against a coherence criterion of legal truth. The result is a blueprint for new press legislation comprising ten principal substances: expanded definitions of the press following the journalistic function; a guarantee of press freedom in both its negative and positive dimensions; a mandatory tiered mechanism of dispute resolution; strengthening of the Press Council; a chapter on the responsibility of digital platform companies; a chapter on artificial intelligence; a journalistic exemption in personal data protection; verification of press companies and protection of citizen journalists; content moderation under judicial supervision; and a harmonising lex specialis clause. The blueprint is crowned by an original theoretical construction, the Theory of Dignified Press Coherence, built on four axioms, five dimensions of coherence and five propositions. The article concludes that the core problem of Indonesian press law is incoherence, and that its remedy is coherence embodied in certain statutory norms.