Page 44 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Origins of Media Controls 29

Professional Co-optation
A fi nal legacy of New Order media controls was the government’s co-optation
of the country’s only legal journalists’ association, the PWI, transforming it from
an organization that represented journalists vis-à-vis the state to one that controlled
them on the state’s behalf. After serving Sukarno, the association switched allegiance
in 1966 and began advancing the New Order’s political agenda, fi rst by purging mem-
bers connected to the PKI. In his study of the association, Togi Simanjuntak argues
that this purge marked the beginning of Suharto’s “taming” of the journalistic pro-
fession. From the PWI’s declaration of support for the new regime at its fi rst post-
Sukarno congress, he suggests, “one could already see that all activities of professional
journalists would be made to conform to the decisions of the Information Ministry.”
At the same time as this physical integration, “the very thought patterns of many
Indonesian journalists . . . would be controlled or absorbed into the New Order’s
political discourse.”
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The PWI maintained some independence in the early days of New Order rule,
rejecting the continuation of Sukarno’s press licensing system as an unconstitutional
violation of freedom of the press. More dramatically, when the Ministry of Informa-
107
tion required all journalists to become members of the PWI in 1969, the association’s
Jakarta office head, Harmoko [one name]—later a top member of the Golkar ruling
party who became minister of information—strongly opposed it, arguing that nothing
in the PWI’s charter gave it the right to “create journalists.” Divisions among the
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PWI’s leadership, however, soon undermined its capacity to resist such measures, and
the association declared its support for the 1969 decree.
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Starting in 1975, the Ministry of Information institutionalized the PWI’s monop-
oly over the representation of journalists through a series of decisions that made it
the sole legally recognized association, or wadah tunggal , for journalists in Indonesia.
110
Simanjuntak explains that the concept of wadah tunggal , that there should be only one
association to represent journalists, was justified on “the pretext of raising the image
and quality of the press.” In practice, however, incorporating the PWI into the state
111
effectively consolidated the latter’s power over print publications.
The ban on alternative associations, in conjunction with required membership,
gave the PWI, and thus the state, considerable power over the media. Applications for
publishing licenses required approval from government agencies, such as the Ministry
of Information, as well as the PWI and the Association of Newspaper Publishers, a
parallel sectoral organization. Moreover, license applications required would-be pub-
lishers to list their entire editorial staff, any of whom could be rejected by the PWI.
License holders were not allowed to make changes to their staff without advance
approval from the association. Finally, “for the rank-and-file journalist,” reports Hill,
“a PWI membership card [was] theoretically essential, and rejection by (or . . . expul-
sion from) the Association, for whatever reason, [was] likely to close the door for-
mally on a press career.”
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The full co-optation of the association, however, occurred through its integration
into first the state bureaucracy and then the regime’s de facto ruling party, Golkar.
Ironically, a key player in this process was the former journalist and future informa-
tion minister Harmoko, who had been the most vocal opponent of the 1969 decree
making PWI membership mandatory. While rising to head the association’s cen-
tral office, Harmoko was also climbing within Golkar. A former PWI vice-treasurer,
Atmakusumah Astraatmadja, has argued that these political connections altered