Page 95 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

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that she had heard it at the office of the legal aid organization LBH. During an editorial
meeting, she said, Dë TAK ’s staff had debated whether to report it. They decided not
to, primarily because they could not confirm the tape’s authenticity. Habibie’s spokes-
woman, Dewi Fortuna Anwar, had avoided meeting with Dë TAK to hear the tape, and
Ghalib had denied, without listening to it, that the other voice was his.
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Panji had no more luck than Dë TAK in getting on-the-record verification for either

voice, but found a way around the legal and ethical challenges this presented, stating
only that the voices “resembled” ( mirip ) Habibie’s and Ghalib’s and reporting not that
the conversation on the tape proved anything, but simply that it was circulating. In
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her critique of Panji , Dë TAK ’s Suyanto did not dispute that her own paper might have
published the tape’s contents if its editors had found a journalistically sound way to
do it. But they decided that it was “not [a] legitimate” news story because it was “only
a conversation” about a situation that was “already apparent from the way [the gov-
ernment] was investigating Suharto.” She further explained that “without data,” the
tape “doesn’t prove anything. It’s not evidence.” Therefore, “from a legal perspective,
it can’t be used.”
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Even more problematic, Suyanto argued, the ambiguities of Panji ’s reporting had
diverted the public’s focus from the Suharto investigation to Panji ’s alleged trans-
gressions. Airing the conversation, moreover, served almost no purpose in advancing
political reform. The report’s transformation of a public secret into a media scan-
dal was “just sensationalism” that amounted to “wasting time” for more important
endeavors.
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As Suyanto predicted, attention did shift from the Suharto investigation to a
hunt for the mastermind behind the wiretap. But the ground shifted again when
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the police summons of Uni Lubis and the other chief editors provoked a response of
defensive solidarity. Whatever private reservations they might have had about Panji ’s
reporting, publicly the press community united in defense of journalists’ right to do
what Panji had done. The consensus was that Panji had neither violated journalistic

ethics nor broken the law, and the government should cease interrogations. Even
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the historically progovernment PWI announced readiness to provide legal and logisti-
cal support to defend Panji should the magazine face a lawsuit, stating that “[w]hat
was published by the magazine was in the public interest” and “the product of suc-
cessful investigati[ve] reporting.”
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Perhaps most critically, one editor after another cited the newly created Journalis-
tic Code of Ethics as the basis for not cooperating with the investigation. In doing so,
they united around both a collective assertion of their rights and a mutual commit-
ment to specific journalistic responsibilities. The controversy bound together journal-
ists, editors, and owners in professing mutual commitment to a shared ethical code.
The controversy also led the press community to affirm their responsibility to the
Indonesian public’s “right to know” and to claim their own right to protect sources
( hak tolak )—both of which at this point enjoyed only limited legal status. The hak tolak
had been codified in the nation’s Basic Press Law, as amended in 1982. A closer look
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at the 1982 amendment reveals that, had the wiretap case gone to trial, the invocation
of either “national security” or “public order” could have rendered this right moot.
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Similarly, the public right to know had a tenuous legal foundation. The recently passed
MPR Decree No. 17 stated that “each person has the right to seek, obtain, possess,
store, process, and convey information using all available channels.” But as long as
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the government could invoke a security issue, neither the hak tolak nor the public’s
right to know offered real protection.