Page 25 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

10 Introduction

vehicle for actors to impose scrutiny on each other (whether out of civic duty, partisan
maneuvering, or personal revenge).
In Indonesia’s tempestuous transition, we can mark a major milestone in this
phase with the election in October 1999 of a new president, Abdurrahman Wahid
(Gus Dur), which denied the long-reigning Golkar party a continued lock on the
executive. Though much of the media ignored the fraud that had compromised the
parliamentary elections just three months earlier, relentless postelection coverage of
a campaign finance scandal known as “Baligate” irreparably damaged Golkar’s can-
didate, President Habibie, in the presidential race and for the first time in decades
forced an incumbent president and his party to accept an unfavorable outcome. In ret-
rospect, Baligate was the start of an era of politics by scandal in Indonesia that made
the media a lead player in a volatile pattern of intraelite conflict and marked a turning
point in the country’s democratic transition.
The long-term change lay in the transformation of the public sphere, no longer
controllable by any one party. Now freed from New Order restrictions, media expo-
sés and political scandal began to play a central yet unpredictable role in mediat-
ing intraelite conflict, as warring factions used the media to maneuver against each
other and news outlets weighed in independently. Most significantly, elite collusive
pacts were now less viable, weakened by the use of scandal as a political weapon and
ensuing cycles of revenge. During five critical years of this transition, 1999 to 2004,
Indonesia saw a relentless cycle of elite attack and counterattack through a succession
of media-driven scandals—Buloggate I, Buloggate II, Taperumgate, Bruneigate, and
Banpresgate.
Through a process described in chapter 7 , the carefully negotiated, ritual resolu-
tions of the Suharto era were now breaking down, weakened by the politics of public
revenge and the new transparency that the media were imposing upon events and
elite rivalries. This factional infighting, played out in the media, was central to the
ultimate endurance of democratization. By fostering intraelite conflict and making
alliances ever more fluid and unpredictable, this new politics by scandal moved Indo-
nesia away from authoritarian stasis and closer to the institutionalized uncertainty of
democracy. Though advanced democracies may view such cycles as a degraded form
of politics, in this postauthoritarian setting, they were critical in derailing the political
collusion and electoral manipulation that threatened to end the country’s democratic
transition.

Reconsidering Scandal
Examining the intersection between the media and democratic uncertainty high-
lights the potential emergent role in democratization of tendencies for which news
outlets are often faulted—namely, preoccupation with scandal, partisan confl ict, and
contest frames, particularly horse-race election coverage. Critics have condemned
these tendencies for “hollowing out” democracy, fostering divisive politics rather
than informed debate, and perhaps most insidiously, promoting apathy and cyni-
cism. Some disparage horse-race coverage for reducing election reporting to sports
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metaphors and strategy analysis, trivializing the political process while crowding out
substantive issues and wider perspectives. Others hold the media responsible for
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“undermining” democracy by failing to convey the significance of news stories within
a larger context.
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