Recently, I rewatched Avengers: Infinity War (2018).
The film’s climax sees an intense battle between the characters and Thanos, the authoritarian purple alien, the latter seemingly invincible in the face of any attack.
However, the snarky surgeon-turned-wizard, Doctor Strange, turned the tide through a duplication spell. It was a mighty spell; hundreds of the Doctor’s duplicated, lifelike clones combined to defeat Eternal-Deviant warlord.
Thanos, one of the Marvel Universe’s strongest characters, ultimately defeated by the Doctor’s army of illusions.
I don’t blame Thanos for his defeat – illusions are, at times, quite convincing.
Take Indonesia’s media landscape: with 47,000 reported media outlets, at face value, the market is saturated and diverse. However, this diversity is an illusion.
In his 2017 book chapter in Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens, and the Digital Revolution, Ross Tapsell outlines the eight dominating media corporations in Indonesia: Trans Corp, MNC, Emtek, Berita Satu, Kompas Group, Visi Media Asia, Jawa Pos Group, and Media Group.
Tapsell asks a poignant question: “is eight independent, market-driven media conglomerates not a perfectly reasonable amount of consumer choice?”
The use of the word ‘independent’ to describe Indonesia’s eight media conglomerates is a far cry from the truth; particularly when Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2025 Report indicates Indonesia’s current press freedom rank at 127/181- 16 spots below the previous year.
Indonesian Australian journalist and RMIT lecturer in Journalism, Tito Ambyo, argues that the media landscape should have as much competition as possible.
“Ideally, you want the media to reflect the variety of ideas that we need to keep moving forward as a society,” he said.
To understand how to move forward, we must move a few steps back because, according to Tapsell, Indonesia’s lack of press freedom started at the turn of the millennium.
Sita Dewi, a PhD student with ANU’s Department of Political and Social Change, traces the beginnings to 2004 – the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia’s 6th president.
Yudhoyono’s presidential win was one infamously fuelled by the media’s support, partly due to the lack of separation between businesses and the government – a separation which was crucial to avoid conflicts of interest in reporting.
RMIT Data Journalism PhD candidate, Utami Kusumawati, argues that this separation blurred during Yudhoyono’s presidency in 2004.
Yudhoyono, heavily favoured by the media, represented new hope for Indonesia’s vulnerable political climate that was fresh out of Soeharto’s authoritarian reign.
The media during Soeharto’s ‘New Order’ era experienced severe censorship and extensive control by the government, all in an effort to advance government propaganda.
Speaking to Metro TV, former Minister of Information, Tifatul Sembiring, explained Yudhoyono’s unique ability to leverage the media and to yield it as a weapon.
“As a politician your capital is your tongue, and you need a media to connect the tongue to the people,” he said.
Yudhoyono shifted his focus to courting media moguls, which Tapsell argues had intensified the relationship between those media moguls and politicians, creating a partisan media landscape lacking in diversity, objectivity, and freedom.
Consequently, media moguls became unafraid of using their outlets for their own political gain.
The Media Moguls’ Political Agenda
In 2005, the head of Jawa Pos news publication, Dahlan Iskan, bought airtime and advertising slots to promote a mayoral campaign.
In his book chapter on media ownership in Politics and Media in Twenty-First Century Indonesia (2011), Ignatius Haryanto shows how other moguls followed suit; Surya Paloh of MetroTV and Aburizal Bakrie of TVOne brazenly manipulated broadcasts for Golkar party campaigns, affecting Indonesian journalists’ autonomy.
Recently, Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election saw three of the nine parties supporting Jokowi’s campaign being headed by media moguls: Hary Tanoesodibjo of MNC Group was the head of the Perindo party, Paloh was the head of the National Democrats Party, and Bakrie was the head of the Golkar party.
Democracy rests on a citizen’s right to make an informed choice. This only works if the information they receive does not play sides.
Increasingly partisan coverage such as this threatens this right, casting questions over the credibility of those voted into power.
Ambyo and Kusumawati agree that despite the media oligarchy, people were still receiving large amounts of information regarding candidates. However, Kusumawati further adds, that the information might have certain agendas.
“So, the audience had less objective information than they could get, and it could influence their freedom of choice,” she said.
According to Ambyo, partisan media creates doubt and distrust, “because often what happens is that you don’t know where information is coming from and what agenda is behind this information.”
Indonesia’s lack of press diversity is not only a danger to its citizens and news consumers, but Indonesia’s press freedom ranking of 127/181 shows that journalists are being harmed by the very newsrooms they work in, their voices being muffled by political agendas.
Don’t Bite the Hand that Feeds You
In Political Regimes and the Media in Asia (2009), David Hill’s chapter on media and politics in regional Indonesia discusses how Indonesian media outlets often, “adjust their level of coverage” of certain issues based on government support.
Kusumawati further explained how the reliance on government funding makes them “less critical”.
Such biased reporting erodes trust in journalists themselves and it is they who come out as the casualties.
Examples of this include, in 2014, Surya Paloh’s and Hary Tanoe’s opposition to Yudhoyono were met by revenue declines and threats of exclusion.
Dewi notes that government support acts as a “lifeline”, with journalists constantly being threatened with comments like, “don’t bite the hand that feeds you”. This creates a growing tendency for journalists to engage in forms of self-censorship.
At its worse, journalists, “simply refuse to report on stories,” said Ambyo. “They know that if they speak about the things that people are not going to, they might lose their jobs.”
In an interview with PR2Media, former chief editor of Metro TV, Arief Suditomo, said that journalists must navigate a variety of agendas, “the agenda of the political party, the editorial agenda, and the trickiest of all, the agenda of the market.”
Journalists are, therefore, entering newsrooms with pre-determined agendas, fitted with muzzles which prohibits their freedom of speech and further erodes their ability to fulfil their democratic function.
Journalism’s Democratic Function: Is it still alive?
As the Fourth Estate, journalism gives a voice to the voiceless and keeps powerful people in check. Issues not fit for dinner tables can be brought to light through journalism.
With Indonesia’s media oligopoly, this crucial role is increasingly being questioned.
Kusumawati argues that the media’s role as the “watchdog of the government” is compromised through the media moguls’ political participation.
The subsequent declining diversity of content weakens this watchdog role and potentially allows issues like corruption and discrimination to go unnoticed.
For Ambyo, a mere handful of people controlling Indonesia’s media is “not good enough” as it silences the voices of minorities whose sensitive issues are disregarded by a majority of mainstream media.
Democratic participation, therefore, becomes a privilege held by the powerful, rather than an enshrined right of the nation’s citizens. The revival of journalism, and subsequently democracy, in Indonesia lies within the rise and expansion of independent and hyperlocal media outlets.
Funded independently, they could speak freely.
“It doesn’t matter if you have an oligopoly, as long as you have healthy independent media that will always challenge the power in them,” Ambyo concluded.
Kusumawati also urged media organisations to return to their essential role; “to deliver content with accuracy, credibility, and integrity.”
Journalism’s lifeblood is in democracy, and when those democratic values are gone, journalism fails to serve its role.
Although the diversity and competition in Indonesia’s media landscape continues to be an illusion, the nation’s journalists and citizens are still capable of working together to find the needle in the haystack…
…the truth.
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Jessica Chloe Djendria is a Second-Year journalism student at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia and is now situated in Melbourne to pursue her degree. She has covered stories related to culture and democracy, and has written pieces on contemporary politics and economics. Her interests lie in current affairs, South East Asian politics, and modern culture and has recently been made Editor-in-Chief RMIT’s student newspaper, The Swanston Gazette.
