INTRODUCTION

The close of the twentieth century has witnessed one of the most profound transformations in the history of the mass media in Indonesia. This, in turn, may open the way for a new era in the country's political history. We do not refer to the widely-discussed and often over-estimated social change brought about by information technology in general and the Internet more specifically. While Indonesia is not immune to some of the symptoms of the Internet fever, another series of developments has taken place in the mediascape, one which has been much less noted by observers inside and especially outside the country. We refer to the social tensions that have accompanied the recent rapid industrialization of the mass media.

This chapter examines a major transition that the Indonesian mass media has been undergoing under the New Order regime (1966–98) and beyond. Crudely, the media's transition can be described as one from personifying an idealist force of “truth-seeker” that is subjected to constant state repression, to an increasingly autonomous, professionally managed, and essentially self-serving industrial empire. However, our main interest is not in that broad and too familiar phenomenon. Like all transitions, the case at hand is full of contradictory elements, movements and tendencies. The ensuing discussion will describe and analyse the various details of tensions among old and new forces that constitute the case in its specific contexts. The main agent of change in the process is neither the abstract state apparatus, nor any specific state agents, nor crusading journalists either. It is the whole network of industrial capitalism at global, national and local levels that has been responsible for the transformation of the media as an institution, as well as its relations with other institutions, including the state.

For many decades the relation between the state and the institution of mass media in Indonesia, as in most of its neighbouring countries, has been one full of suspicion and tensions. The state has both sponsored and controlled media developments as part of the consolidation of nation–state building and modernization. Today, the Indonesian state has lost nearly all of its paternalistic control of the mass media. And, comparable to situations in neighbouring Thailand and the Philippines, state officials and institutions have been regular targets of criticism and derision by the press.