Page 36 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Origins of Media Controls 21

corporatist norms, and the carrot of a protected market all cultivated a culture of
compliance.
In the regime’s early days, despite ongoing bloodshed in the name of restoring
order and the relentless pursuit of suspected members of the Indonesian Communist
Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), there was relief among many journalists and
intellectuals at being liberated from Sukarno’s Guided Democracy. There was, more-
over, optimism over new reforms. Although one of Suharto’s first acts was to shut
down forty-six newspapers associated with the PKI, many previously banned publica-
tions were revived, including Mochtar Lubis’s Indonesia Raya .
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In late 1966, the new parliament passed the long-awaited Basic Press Law, con-
taining twenty-one sections covering nearly every aspect of media functions, from
journalists’ duties to the composition of the National Press Council. The law protected
news outlets from outright bans and promised abolition of the notorious press license
system once the transition to the New Order was complete. As David Hill notes,
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during Suharto’s first years, “those newspapers which had supported [the regime’s]
emergence . . . enjoyed opportunities for often robust debate.” One cabinet minister
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compared this period to 1968’s Prague Spring.
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In the new regime’s early years, Jakarta’s surviving newspapers were instrumen-
tal in imposing transparency on the government—particularly its management of the
government oil monopoly, Pertamina. Scandal, fed by leaks, was the primary mecha-
nism. What was arguably the most famous scandal broke in November 1969, when
Indonesia Raya published a scathing critique of Pertamina’s management. The article
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featured a photograph of the company’s director, the Suharto crony Ibnu Sutowo, next
to his new Rolls Royce and accused his organization of “waste, inefficiency, and all
kinds of irregularities and unjustifiable expenditures.” It backed these charges with
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leaked data documenting nepotism and payoffs as well as the purchase of assets at far
above market value.
41
The controversy that followed saw the beginnings of the logic that would stigma-
tize political journalism and legitimate the proliferation of media controls. Disregard-
ing the value of investigative reporting in helping avert economic disaster, the regime
and several newspapers accused Indonesia Raya of adopting a “crusading” style of jour-
nalism and began treating it as a threat. After raising suspicions about the paper’s
motives, the regime began to condemn such journalism as fostering what editor and
scholar Daniel Dhakidae calls “the politics of negation.”
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Despite its unwelcome reception, Indonesia Raya ’s exposé prompted the govern-
ment to appoint a special investigative group, the Commission of Four. The commis-
sion’s findings were damning, confirming the paper’s allegations and uncovering tax
evasion so egregious that it nearly drove the state into bankruptcy. The 1970 leak of
this official report by another major daily, Sinar Harapan , kept public attention focused
on Pertamina, forcing enactment of a 1971 law increasing the company’s payments
to the state.
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This controversy demonstrated the media’s vital role as an early warning system
for economic mismanagement. As the government scrambled to cover Pertamina’s
payments and save it from a bankruptcy likely to bring down the New Order, each
revelation was a reminder of the costs of the failed oversight of this most valuable
state enterprise. But the revelations also showed scandal’s potential to weaken the
regime’s legitimacy. Even after vowing to clean up the corruption, President Suharto
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condemned the media’s reporting as “excessively mean” and “confusing [to] the
society.”
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