Senyap Audience In The Debate Of Presidential Candidates

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The debate of presidential and vice presidential candidates via television cannot be separated from showbiz or shows. Showbiz himself could not escape from the audience. However, the debate of presidential candidates should not be the same as a talent-seeking contest where the noise of the audience at the event venue is an important element in the show.

The low voice of the audience has indeed made the event even more interesting to watch. But in the presidential candidate debate, the audience can distract the candidates so that the failure to convey an objective message to the general public.

Realizing this situation, a number of countries designed a sawala or debate that made the audience in a passive state. In the United States, there are even calls to the general election commission so that there are new rules to reduce possible disturbances from spectators.

Some of them even think that emptying the debate room from the audience will raise the dignity of the debate because presidential candidates are more focused on discussing election issues.

The format of the silent audience is also more able to break the clear and complete view of the candidates, in addition to the loss of the opportunity for a candidate to be "burned" by the emotions of the audience so that they are not provoked to attack each other personally.

As in every show, including political talks, viewers often make resource persons aggressive and not objective.

In fact, the masses often give more energy that makes a person leave a common sense to better defend arguments as strong as possible, even though it may not make sense.

This is an aspect called the world's leading philosopher and psychologist Sigmund Freud, as mass psychology.

According to Freud, as part of the masses, individuals acquire an infinite sense of power that makes them act based on the stimuli that should be controlled by that individual.

This sense of power and security does make individuals act as part of the mass and feel safe in number, but this situation eliminates the awareness of the personality and tendency of individuals to be affected by the emotions of the masses.

In fact, the masses were very impulsive, easily changed, and easily offended, because they were almost completely controlled by the unconscious.

As a result, still borrowing Sigmund Freud's theory, a person in a crowd becomes a hypothesized person as every individual in a group becomes acting on the push for love that deviates from its original goals.

Quiet but still dramatic

In the context of the presidential candidate debate, the aggressiveness of the audience often spreads to individual candidates, until the objectivity of the candidate is lost so that the debate becomes merely an emotional battle, not a common sense battle.

In this situation, the biggest "victims" are voters who participate in debates from television screens at home or places that are far from the debate venue.

In fact, they are far more numerous and may be far more objective than those in studios or debate venues in Indonesia, which are usually attended by success teams that are certainly partisans.

Voters are mostly victims because they do not get the complete view of the presidential candidate they should get from the debate.

This is probably the reason countries such as the United States, France, and Brazil minimize the role of spectators in the studio in the presidential candidate debate.

They put the most of the people who were not present directly at the debate venue and prevented the debate process from being polluted by the emotions of the audience at the debate venue.

In those countries, the audience still exists, but in a silent state, unlike in the debate of presidential candidates in Indonesia and the Philippines, which are never as quiet as the audience's noise is low.