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View all search resultsForty years of being bold and independent
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T
he Jakarta Post may have owed its birth to several key figures who worked under the New Order, a political regime that tightly controlled the flow of information and put in place curbs on freedom of speech, but over the course of almost 40 years, through the social and political upheaval that resulted in a regime change, five cycles of general elections and four new presidents, this newspaper has stuck to being bold and independent, sometimes at the risk of losing its voice altogether.
The journey begun when the Post’s founder, Jusuf Wanandi, held a meeting with then information minister Ali Moertopo – a close ally of New Order strongman Soeharto – and shared his proposal to set up a good quality English-language daily, one that was designed to be the world’s window into Indonesia.
For Jusuf, existing English-language dailies at that time just could not cut it. “Existing English-language dailies at the time did not manage to accurately capture the opinions of Indonesians,” he said. “Our main priority was to make the Post a credible paper.”
It was not an easy start and after a turbulent first five years, things started to look good for the paper and it was during this time that the Post began to play an "activist" role, writing about what the Indonesian people expected from the New Order government, as well as promoting Indonesia's place in the world.
It helped that the paper in the pre-internet era wrote in English, a language that was not too familiar to the majority of government workers and the censorship apparatus.
“We realized that since we were an English paper, we could be just that bit more expressive in voicing criticisms [toward the government]. There was a lot of hope on us, but it was a balancing act; we couldn’t take [the criticism] too far, or risk being shut down,” Jusuf said in a recent interview.
Bold under pressure
