Page 64 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Indonesia: perning in the Gyre 53
Suharto’s brutal suppression of student protests in 1974 and the closure of
newspapers for their coverage of the uprising underlined Suharto’s authoritarian
attitudes to the flow of information. Suharto’s ‘mantra’ was clear: stability and
economic development ahead of democracy and transparency (Harsono 2000: 81).
The New Order tried ‘relentlessly’ to make Jakarta the centre of the domestic
culture and of the perception industries, as part of the centralisation of power under
Suharto and the single-minded push to make Jakarta the epicentre of the country
not only politically but economically and culturally as well. Turning his will to unit-
ing the country, and centralising power, Suharto tried to prevent regional, ethnic,
linguistic and religious differences from taking a political form, by seeking to
‘authorise’ them (Keeler 1987: 79). In addition, Suharto also created an ‘intricate
web of relations between the press and the government’(Makarim 1978: 263–264).
Initially, Suharto’s family and close allies controlled the privately owned
media, but as the industry expanded, a more indirect form of control was neces-
sary. By the 1990s, other groups moved in to control new media operations.
Membership of this new family, however, depended on being prepared to operate
under ‘the constraints imposed by the New Order government’ (Hill 1996: 86).
Suharto’s time in power marked the growth in influence of powerful corporate
conglomerates and the political and business influence of powerful families in the
country. Indeed, concern about them internally and externally contributed to
the fall of the New Order (Robison 2001: 109).
But Suharto also delivered remarkable economic change. During the thirty years
between 1966 and 1996, the important economic and social indicators over this
period ‘far exceeded the expectations of even the most optimistic observers at the
beginning of the regime’ (Hill 1996: 255). An associated feature of the New Order
was ‘the emergence of an affluent urban middle class’ (Hooker 1993: 3), leading to
an expansion in demand for the media: in the 1950s sales of newspapers were about
50,000 copies but by 1973 total circulation was 1.5 million (Suanto 1978: 230).
Television was particularly easy to police. The state broadcaster, TVRI,
provided a news monopoly from Jakarta, and even the independent television sta-
tions, when they came along after 1995, were all backed by influential conglom-
erates, and prepared to manipulate their coverage: choice of story, timing of reports,
choice of perspective in pictures and quotes, reflected the status quo, producing
‘uncontroversial products’ (Sen and Hill 2000: 126–131).
The impact of satellite, however, was ambiguous. The same technology that
was used to unite Indonesia around Suharto’s political and cultural capital,
Jakarta, also provided avenues for alternative messages facilitating diversity and
division. Unlike Singapore, Indonesia did not ban satellite dishes and, thus, did
not attempt to stop people watching foreign television broadcasts, emphasising
the porosity of the Indonesian state. In 1996, for example, RTP International, a
Portuguese satellite television service, began broadcasting into East Timor. Using
transponder space on the largely Chinese-owned AsiaSat 2, the Portuguese gov-
ernment could support East Timor’s struggle for self-determination, and the
Indonesian authorities were helpless to control its broadcasts. The entry of global
networks producing news in Indonesia – CNN, Reuters, BBC, ABN (Australia)