TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Decline in Indonesia’s press freedom alarming
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Members of the Indonesian Television Journalists Association (IJTI) with their faces covered with black boxes that read “a free press is a constitutional mandate” and their wrists linked by a chain, demonstrate on May 17, 2024, outside the Blitar Legislative Council, East Java. (Antara/Irfan Sumanjaya)
T
he press is facing mounting repression, with journalists reporting growing intimidation and attacks, sparking concerns over the state of media freedom as the country transitions into President Prabowo Subianto’s administration.
According to Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) secretary-general Bayu Wardhana, press freedom and journalist safety in the country this year has reached a “concerning” level.
“The media are often obstructed when seeking information, directed to cover only what those in power want, banned from covering violent acts of law enforcement when dispersing protesters and pushed to act as a public relations tool for the government,” Bayu told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
National news magazine Tempo has emerged as one of the most targeted media outlets this year. On May 2, a Tempo journalist documenting a police crackdown on May Day demonstrators in Semarang, Central Java, was grabbed by an officer who was attempting to seize his phone.
Tempo’s website suffered from a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in April following the publication of an investigative report on an online gambling network in Cambodia, allegedly linked to Indonesian political and business elites.
But clearer intimidation occurred earlier in March, when the Tempo office in Jakarta received a pig’s head and decapitated rats in separate incidents, both addressed to the magazine's political journalists. These cases have been reported to the police, but no visible progress has been made in the investigation.
Read also: Police investigate intimidation of ‘Tempo’ journalists
