1.1 Studying Post-Authoritarian Public Broadcasters
The fall of communist political regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and authoritarian political systems in Asia in the 1990s brought about changes in media systems, including a shift from the state-owned broadcasting model to the public service broadcasting (PSB) model (In this book, the term PSB is used to refer to either “public service broadcasting” or “public service broadcaster”.). Since the late 1980s, many post-communist and post-authoritarian countries—the so-called transitional regimes—introduced PSB systems to replace existing government broadcast systems (e.g., Estonia, Macedonia, and Mongolia as well as countries in the Middle East and North Africa) through policy reform (Jakubowicz and Sukosd 2008; Raboy 1995; Smith 2012). This change was also driven by pro-democratic actors in the global arena, who sought to ensure that new governments adopted a liberal democratic media system (Banarjee and Seneviratne 2006; Harding 2015).
Taking part of the growing debate on media transformation and PSB adoption in post-authoritarian societies, this study explores the way in which PSB was legally introduced and implemented as the Indonesian political system transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy. The struggle to adopt PSB during the early period of political reformation that followed the resignation of Suharto (1998–2002) is discussed herein, followed by an exploration of the obstacles faced by former state-owned broadcasters, namely Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI) and Televisi Republik Indonesia (TVRI), as Indonesian PSB providers between 2002 and 2017. This study also explores broadcasting system models under both the Dutch and Japanese colonial regimes (1930s–1940s) through the end of the New Order regime, covering both the Sukarno and Suharto eras (1945–1998), as the historical backdrop of the arrival of the PSB model in Indonesia.
In this book, the term post-authoritarian society refers to a society that is experiencing a political transition that is defined by the absence of an autocratic regime and the presence of a new, but unstable, government. As argued by O’Donnell and Philippe (1986), this begins with the fall of dictatorial power and ends with the acceptance of democracy. In this climate, media policies are uncertain, either because they are difficult to apply or because every stakeholder wants his or her own rules. As described by O’Donnell and Philippe (1986), in such a society, the policy-making model shifts from linear (with the government being dominant) to circular (with local and global actors involved in the policy-making).1 Policy creation is also driven by the length of time the former political regime held power and by the state ideology. It is also shaped by the history and political culture of the transitional nation (Carnegie 2010).
Looking at post-authoritarian politics, this book frames Indonesia’s PSB adoption initiative as an instant policy driven by the euphoria of welcoming a democratic media system, one without roots in a pro-public broadcast system in the country’s colonial and authoritarian periods. Such a picture is typically found in post-authoritarian states in Asia and Africa, including Zimbabwe (Mano 2016), India (Mohapatra and Das 2014), and Bangladesh (Rahman 2014). However, given the long history of Western colonialism (up to the 1940s) and authoritarianism (1966–1998) in Indonesia, investigating the importation of what is globally perceived as a Western European PSB model in the country is challenging.
This study is inspired by the broad hypotheses of Hallin and Mancini (2004) and Voltmer (2013) regarding the influences of political changes and media transformation when a PSB is the primary form of political intervention from government and parliament. In accordance with the four indicators of media systems developed by Hallin and Mancini (media market structure, political parallelism, professionalism in journalism, and the state role in media), this study explores two main areas of inquiry and conceptualization. First, it addresses PSBs and political systems (e.g., political parallelism and the degree of state control over media). This includes a debate on the strong links between the political system and PSBs (policy and governance). Past studies on media reform in Asia have confirmed that the influence of political forces is much more significant than that of economic or technological forces (Im 2006, 2011; Kwak 1999; Lin 2012).
Second, the study is concerned with concepts of PSB policy and institutional component. Particular focus is given to four aspects: remit, ownership, structure, and funding. The findings and assumptions of past studies of PSBs in transitional democracies are examined from a scholarly perspective. Several studies of media and PSB systems (e.g., Hallin and Mancini 2004; Hanretty 2007; McCargo 2012; Raboy 1997; Voltmer 2013) are used as points of departure. In this book, the author considers the four components not only as categorical concepts but also as research objects. This study tracks the changes and continuity of Indonesia’s former state-controlled broadcasters as they transitioned into public-oriented service channels.
Following the fall of communist regimes worldwide in the late 1980s, scholars began paying attention to the strong ties between political changes and broadcasting systems, focusing on the trend of PSB creation and crises in eastern and central Europe (Jakubowicz 2006; Moe 2008; Mendel 2000; Smith 2012). To a lesser degree, studies have examined the adoption of BBC-like models of PSB policy and governance in Asia and Africa and their failures following the collapse of authoritarian regimes in the late 1990s (DW Akademie 2014; Raboy 1995; Thomson 2013; Voltmer 2008, 2012).
Nevertheless, systematic assessment of PSB reform in Southeast Asia is still limited. Previous investigations have rarely applied a broad perspective to the interplay of politics and PSB invention in post-authoritarian settings (Rahman 2014; Tangkitvanich 2008). Voltmer (2013), for example, examined the PSB systems in countries that transitioned to multi-party systems from one-party dictatorships during the third wave of democracy. This does not include PSB implementation in Indonesia, despite its post-authoritarian political regime.
The PSB concept was initially used to describe broadcast systems established in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (Syvertsen and Moe 2009). The first PSB model emerged in Western Europe after World War I; this was the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), established in 1922 in the United Kingdom. The BBC model was influential when it began regular television service in 1936 (Blumler 1992). After several decades, the BBC model was developed into a variety of models in the Global North and Global South. The BBC is considered a classic model, and it has been adopted by established and new democracies outside Europe, such as Japan, Canada, and Thailand. During the 1930s and 1940s, most European states adopted similar public channels, with radio as their stable platform. The widespread dissemination of television after World War II expanded broadcasts to this platform (van Dijk et al. 2005).
However, as will be discussed in this book, the author agrees with Voltmer (2013) and Thomson (2013): The Western European concept of media or the PSB system might be difficult to export to other political and cultural contexts. Legacies of tyrannical politics, including paternalistic culture (Romano 2003), clientelism (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos 2002), and the rise of oligarchy in media industry ownership (Winters 2014), have delayed the application of PSB systems. Moreover, the cultural shift toward neoliberal thinking and the reliance on free market competition for broadcasting called the PSB concept and state policies into question.
Evaluations of new PSBs in ‘the fragile states’ of postwar Africa have found limited support from existing political regimes (Putzel and Zwan 2005). Two reports, entitled ‘Looking for Shortcuts, Assistance to and Development of PSB in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania’ (Thomson 2013) and ‘Public Service Media in the Divided Society, Relic or Renaissance?’ (Harding 2015), confirm the failure of PSBs in the African region, despite media developm...