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Origins of Media Controls 31

Reforestation Fund. Among other ventures, they financed the 1997 Southeast Asian
Games and a multimillion-dollar loan to a pulp paper company controlled by Suhar-
to’s golfing partner and former minister of industry, Mohamad “Bob” Hasan. Such
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decrees also created the monopolies and tariff protections that generated wide profit
margins for even the most poorly run of the Suharto empire’s companies. A report
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from the Indonesian Transparency Society released five months after Suharto’s fall
identified seventy-nine presidential decrees between 1993 and 1998 that directly ben-
efited the business interests of Suharto’s family or cronies. Although Suharto was
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able to bypass parliamentary oversight in issuing most of these decrees, they still
entered the public record—almost without mention in the media.

In Suharto’s last eighteen months, the costs of spreading corruption and a silenced
media would become painfully apparent as the economy collapsed during the 1997
Asian financial crisis, plunging the nation into massive unemployment and wide-

spread hunger. The 1974 and 1978 crackdowns that had muzzled the print press and
the country’s university students also encouraged the subjugation of broader civil
society. These events moved Indonesia into a decade marked by stifl ed public debate,
deepening corruption, and an increasingly quiescent media, subdued further by Sinar
Harapan ’s closure in 1986 and the ban of another publication, Prioritas , in 1987. With-
out critical reporting as a check on the regime’s excesses, the following decade saw
deepening structural corruption and a steep increase in Suharto’s use of the state to
enrich his entourage, particularly his children, whose business empires soon pen-
etrated nearly every sector of the economy.
The foundations of control and corruption that came to define the New Order
were in place long before Suharto took power. Reviving the ideology of integralism,
Suharto augmented these controls by transforming the media into an embedded ele-
ment of state power, making journalists complicit in his regime’s legitimating dis-
course and inculcating a reflexive self-censorship that helped insulate the regime from
political challenge.
Consequently, when the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in 1997, the regime’s
organizing principle was not fair and open competition rewarding the best business
plans with government contracts or the best candidates with public office. Rather, it
was a system of institutionalized collusion providing the regime and its favorites with
the certainties of rigged political, legal, and economic contestation. Cronies enjoyed
no-bid contracts and the extraordinary profits afforded by protected markets. Wealthy
or well-connected parties in lawsuits enjoyed the assurance of favorable verdicts. Can-
didates won office not through the uncertainty of free elections but through outcomes
engineered by the ruling party’s political machine. These overlapping and interwoven
elements of patronage politics, shielded from the scrutiny that might have checked
them, left the Indonesian economy vulnerable to the shock of market discipline from
the financial crisis.
The elaborate media controls developed under the Old and New Orders, from
1959 to 1998, weighed heavily on Indonesia’s postauthoritarian media. Reformers,
cohering as a community by the mid-1990s, therefore faced two main tasks. The
first—challenging regulatory controls—involved a binary opposition between com-
pliance and resistance that would, over time, lead to legal reforms. As later chapters
show, the second, even more complex, task was transforming the media’s underlying
political culture, tainted by collusion, legitimated by ideology, perpetuated through
self-censorship, and privileging consensus over accountability.