Page 41 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

26 Chapter 1

This legitimacy had several sources. Sukarno’s rule had left a memory of a para-
lyzed government, lacking the mechanisms to resolve conflicts among parties sharply
divided along ideological lines. Suharto’s reconstruction of the 1965–66 military-led
massacre as a spontaneous eruption of civil war, virtually unchallenged throughout
his reign, fostered widespread belief that the country’s harmony was fragile and Indo-
nesians were inherently prone to volatility.
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Against this background, the New Order agenda to depoliticize the media and
broader civil society, to reject the “politics as commander” ( politik sebagai panglima )
mentality of the previous era, held a certain appeal. Evidence of this attitude among
news outlets can be seen as early as 1969 in the response to Indonesia Raya ’s investiga-
tive reporting. Kompas called this journalism an anti-corruption “crusade,” while an
armed forces publication, Angkatan Bersenjata , accused Indonesia Raya of harming the
national interest by aiding foreign oil companies in their plot to “destroy” Perta-
mina. Kompas , joined by another large daily, Pedoman , also began questioning Mochtar
Lubis’s motives, sparking a debate over the proper place of the press in politics.
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Following the 1978 four-point pledge, statements by Kompas ’s chief editor, Jakob
Oetama, reveal a deeper internalization. “While the Western press prioritized the
oversight [function],” in Indonesia, he said, “the ‘partnership’ between the press and gov-
ernment needs to be supported.” Demonstrating his belief in a cultural foundation for
such positive interaction, he continued: “The relationship that ties together the press
and the government under Indonesian democracy in this era is not submission . . .
[nor] opposition, but agreeable discussion, often called ‘partnership’ . . . based on
the spirit of gotong-royong [mutual help], and consensus-oriented deliberation, and
kekeluargaan that constitute Indonesia’s public character.” Over time, this rhetoric
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of partnership, positive interaction, family-ism, and consensus gave self-censorship
increasing legitimacy, while “politics” came to be considered “dirty.”
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Abetting the legitimacy of government restrictions and self-policing was the
regime’s construction of the news media as “free but responsible—where freedom
includes the right not to publish.” This phrase reduced the cognitive dissonance
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between the constitution’s guarantees for press freedom and the Basic Press Law on
the one hand, and the tight constraints the news media faced on the other. It also
legitimated self-censorship. Within the model of freedom with responsibility, news
outlets could nominally use their own judgment, and the Suharto regime cited the
absence of a priori censorship as evidence of media freedom. But consequences for
wrong decisions could be severe, and daily judgment calls relied on uncertain assess-
ments of appropriateness, making the question of boundaries almost unanswerable.
Such uncertainty, combined with arbitrary enforcement of perceived violations, pro-
duced a conservatism approaching paranoia among news outlets and a “climate of
fear” that became far more stultifying than overt government censorship would have
been.
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Appropriation of Pancasila

Perhaps the most effective means for giving self-censorship legitimacy, however,
was the regime’s revival of integralism and its appropriation of the Pancasila ideology
to serve a corporatist agenda. The legitimacy of the “positive interaction” doctrine, for
example, formalized in the National Press Council’s 1974 guidelines, drew on inte-
gralist norms articulated by the information minister, Mashuri [one name], during a
speech at the University of Indonesia. The press could not, he insisted, behave as if