Page 121 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

106 Chapter 5

Indonesian media succumbed to pressure to ignore the cheating to save the elections,
and in doing so, failed to guard the integrity of the electoral process.
Yet as the following chapter shows, the country was not right back where it had
started, largely because the media had, in fact, undergone a fundamental change.
From the rule writing through the count, outward manifestations of this transforma-
tion remained largely superficial, filling the public sphere with bluster, sensational-
ism, and some critical debate but effectively ignoring the fraud that compromised the
country’s first post–New Order elections, tilting the transition toward reversal. In the
next stage, however, the run-up to the October selection of the president, the power
of Indonesia’s newly liberated media to block this same reversal became clear with a
campaign finance scandal that jolted them into action, setting off a competitive frenzy
among news outlets, each vying to break the next development. The revelation and
counterrevelation that followed would pitch Indonesia into a maelstrom of factional
infighting and partisan warfare that, surprisingly, made continued democratization
possible.