Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Dictators use the Media Differently than Narcissists and Bullies

    On Saturday, Sean Spicer held a press conference in which he lied about the size of President Trump’s inauguration audience and then refused to take questions. To many, this was just more evidence of the new administration’s authoritarian ambitions (see e.g. here, here, here). In my opinion, there are clear differences.

    I reach this conclusion based on my experience studying two authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia: Malaysia and New Order Indonesia. As part of the research for my dissertation (later this book), I actually did something that many of us never do: I read the news produced by under authoritarianism for several years. Specifically, I tried to read every political and economic story in a series of newspapers both Indonesia and Malaysia between roughly summer 1997 and fall 1999. My goal was to understand the course of events of the Asian Financial Crisis and how they would have appeared in the eyes of everyday citizens in days before the widespread availability of new media.

    To be clear, I was not interested in the accuracy of the media itself as part of this exercise, because I assumed that all reporting would be biased and incomplete. Rather, I wanted to complement my other sources of information—rich and detailed secondary sources, interviews with key decisionmakers, and so forth—with what would have been the flow of information in real time. This is important because of the hindsight problem, in which people attribute more coherence and logic to their actions with the benefit of hindsight than they would have at the time. (To see this in action, you can read my commentary on this very exercise, written on an earlier version of this blog back in 2005!)

    Nevertheless, I learned quite a bit about how the authoritarian print media work in these two cases. This is useful to contrast to the current media environment and Mr. Trump’s administration.

    The first and most important conclusion is that dictators do not lie openly to the media about things that are easy to check. Lies, which are studiously avoided in any case, are reserved for facts that cannot be checked. “Wait, did Soeharto just have stroke???” “Soeharto’s health is fine, and he looks forward to getting back to work.” And even so, the lies are rare. Indeed, I found that much of the everyday reporting about political and economic events was relatively accurate in terms of recording events as they unfolded. The reporting was selective, of course, but that is why other sources of information are so critical.

    Second, authoritarian media is about misdirection, not just misinformation. Rather than tell a lie, the authoritarian media wishes to paint a picture. That picture has blurry features here and there, but the point is for the audience to step back to appreciate the picture as a whole. Even at the height of these two countries’ economic crises, most of the news was about lifestyle issues, regular business affairs, sports, and so forth. The purpose of the media is to report on those pieces of information that are consistent with that picture. For example, it is fine to publicize lifestyle debates about traffic or the high cost of schooling just so long as they can be reported as evidence of rapid material progress that justifies the steady hand of the ruling government. Negative or damaging news doesn’t generate lies or outbursts in response, it is simply not covered at all.

    Third, authoritarian media focus on motivations rather than actions. A president or prime minister is pure hearted, dedicated, hard-working, and intelligent. The details of what he actually does are important only insofar as they reflect these qualities. By contrast, the opposition are stupid, craven, and disloyal. Even when their actions may have good consequences, coverage must question their intentions.

    Fourth, to be effective, authoritarian media cannot have competition. One of the most interesting conclusions I reached from my exercise is that no one would read these new stories if he or she had any alternative. This does not mean that the regime is busy writing stories and force feeding them to various news outlets; rather, it means that the regime must cultivate a media landscape where real critical investigative journalism is not available. One does this by political ownership and control over the entire media landscape and liberal use of the courts to silence not just critics but also their publishers. 90% control won’t do, it must be complete.

    So how do these differ from what we saw Saturday? To me, the differences are clear. No successful dictator would send a minion to berate the press about an easily checked fact. A dictator would ignore it entirely, and focus on something else. Only someone singularly obsessed with the display of dominance would insist, against all evidence, that he was more popular by some opaque metric than anyone else in American history. That’s what a narcissist or a bully does, not a dictator.

    That said, there is one important similarity: President Trump does completely follow the authoritarian’s template that “media focus on motivations rather than actions.” Just look at this morning’s tweet.

    Mr. Trump seems to thrive on the notion that he must portray himself as successful and intelligent (“Trust me, I’m like a smart person.”). The U.S. mainstream media have adopted that narrative as well—the debate has focused more on whether he is really successful or not (in yes-no-yeeeees! fashion), rather than on what he announced that he would do in office. In my view that is a mistake. I will note that this is consistent with Masha Gessen’s advice to “believe the autocrat,” which reaches a different conclusion than my own.

    We have also for some time lived in a world of U.S. politics in which intentions dominate actions in the political media. Plenty of people believe that Secretary Clinton and President Obama are crooked. Plenty of people have also long believed that President Bush was an idiot and Vice President Cheney was evil.

    Nevertheless, dictators are often also narcissists and bullies, so this similarity between Mr. Trump and the authoritarians warrants careful attention. But the U.S. media landscape already contains within it a useful check on any administration’s authoritarian tendencies, which is the fragmentation of the media landscape combined with the profit-driven search for ratings and sales on all sides. No contemporary media outlet in the U.S. wins viewers or readers by reporting facts or beliefs from the Government Information Bureau. Even those whose partisanship tilts towards one party or the other need opponents to argue with to gin up interest, and hence ratings. Talk radio is the closest thing to an exception, but the money in talk radio pales in comparison to the money in traditional media. And without a doubt, the broadcast and print media have proven absolutely thrilled to cover Mr. Trump, and critically so. That’s not ending any time soon.

    Thinking about narcissism versus authoritarianism also provides some suggestions for how to respond. The strategy for combating authoritarianism in a controlled media environment is very tricky. The strategy for combatting a bully is pretty straightforward: bloody his nose and show everyone how he cries.

    It is the strategy for covering a narcissist which is the most delicate. The narcissist’s dilemma is that he requires constant media attention, yet must simultaneously convince his audience that the media cannot be trusted. My advice is to remember that if there are no questions, then it is not press conference, and does not need to be covered. Just don’t look. Take away the media and the narcissist will beg for it to come back.

    The challenge for today’s media is that the very fragmentation that makes political control hard also makes collective action difficult.

  • U.S.-Indonesian Relations at a Crossroads

    The U.S. and Indonesia have enjoyed good bilateral relations since the late 1960s, when the rise of Soeharto saw the elimination of the world’s largest communist party in a non-communist country. Relations have been grown warmer since the fall of the New Order in 1998, and after the election of President Obama. For nearly twenty years, Indonesia has been a useful partner, a moderate Muslim-majority democracy committed to combatting international terrorism.

    Now, quite unexpectedly, U.S.-Indonesian relations are at a crossroads.* The election of President-elect Donald Trump brings to office a president with no meaningful foreign policy experience but extensive business interests in Indonesia. At the same time, Indonesia is experiencing one of its periodic upticks in visible Islamism in national politics, featuring most notably the mobilization of hundreds of thousands for a march in Jakarta defending Islam. The intersection of these two developments will have substantial implications for U.S.-Indonesian relations in the coming decade.

    Let’s take the U.S. case first. President-elect Trump has no foreign policy experience, and observers of U.S. foreign policy have repeatedly remarked that he and his transition team have been slow to build out his foreign policy arm. As I noted here in discussing Trump and Southeast Asia, this makes it hard to know what sort of expertise and interests will be represented in the region. But one thing is almost for certain: those countries and regions that are relatively low foreign policy priorities are likely to be afterthoughts at best, ignored at worst.

    In such situations, people-to-people contacts among career diplomats in the State Department ought to maintain good relations between the U.S and Indonesia. However, a foreign policy team that is uninterested in or simply unaware of the details may make the jobs of Indonesia hands quite a bit harder. To give one example, the South China Sea is shaping up to be an area where China will test the new U.S. administration. Countries in East and Southeast Asia are important partners here. But Indonesia’s position on the South China Sea is delicate and nuanced, as Indonesia does not have any direct stake in the territorial dispute. Nevertheless, it has recently displayed more assertiveness around the Natuna archipelago—unquestionably part of Indonesian territory—after recent confrontations with China. From a purely U.S.-centric perspective, how to manage this regional partner to get what both countries want in the South China Sea? This requires understanding how Indonesians value territorial sovereignty as well as the relationship between foreign/security policy aims and the various arms of the Indonesian government. The devil is all in the details, and ill-considered statement about U.S. intentions in the region could do serious damage.

    But for all the uncertainty about the Trump administration’s foreign policy attention and expertise, there are other personal connections that might matter. President-elect Trump and media mogul Hary Tanoesoedibjo are business partners, and Hary Tanoe will attend the inauguration. This is meaningful because Hary Tanoe has started his own political party, Partai Perindo, as a personal vehicle through which to seek the Indonesian presidency in 2019.

    The fact that Hary Tanoe happens to be of Chinese ancestry, and Christian, makes developments on the Indonesian side particularly interesting.

    Jakarta’s Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known popularly as Ahok, is currently on trial for blasphemy, allegedly having insulted Islam in a speech last fall. Jakarta is both the capital and largest city of Indonesia, and so this trial gets national attention even if the verdict is all but certain. Indonesian law does make it illegal to insult another religion, but every serious observer understands that Ahok’s trial is part of the current chapter of the Game of Houses** in Indonesian politics. Former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s son Agus Harimurti is challenging Ahok for Governor. So too is Anies Baswedan, who has embraced hardline Islamists and is supported by Prabowo Subianto. Ahok, brought into Jakarta politics from Bangka-Belitung by Prabowo, is now supported by Megawati Sukarnoputri. Ahok, being a Christian of Chinese descent, is uniquely vulnerable to criticism that he has insulted Islam.

    On December 2 of this past year, a mass demonstration was held in Jakarta entitled “Defending Islam Action III.” Perhaps as many as 750,000 people attended. Greg Fealy’s analysis addresses the potential links between this anti-Ahok protest and the possibly Islamist motives of many of the participants. As Sana Jaffrey has observed, recent years have seen a rise in actions protesting “insults” and “offenses”, although the December 2 demonstration is obviously different from the kinds of mob actions which comprise the bulk of such incidents.

    The global optics of Islamist mobilization in Indonesia are not good (see e.g. this New York Times story from last week). Hary Tanoe sided with Prabowo in the 2014 elections. He has defended the Indonesian police in the Ahok case, and criticized Jokowi for not dealing swiftly enough to forestall the December 2 protests. (It is not clear what Hary Tanoe thinks Jokowi should have done besides being decisive and authoritative in some abstract way.) I happen to believe that the current emphasis on Islamic radicalism in Indonesia is misplaced; such headline-grabbing events happen every couple of years, and Indonesia has a long history of Islamist movements in politics, all the way back to Sarekat Islam. But that does not much matter, especially to any observer who is uninterested or ill-equipped to understand Indonesia’s political history or the complex motivations of those who participate in Indonesian social movements.

    How then should we understand the new Trump administration in the context of Indonesian national politics? Best case scenario: business as usual for a country located far from the Eurasia-Oceania alliance. I suspect, however, that relations may change, perhaps not deteriorating, but resting less on mutual strategic interests and more on the transactional nature of Trump’s own interests in Indonesia.

    The implications could be important. For example, in the context of an administration less focused on foreign policy but with personal and business connections to wealthy elites seeking political power, a new narrative might emerge about Indonesia in DC. Under Obama, as under Bush, Indonesia was a partial success story, an example for other Muslim majority countries of how democracy and Islam can mix even under inauspicious conditions (relative poverty, extreme inequality, territorial fragmentation, etc). Under Trump, the stage is being set for Indonesia to be portrayed as acutely vulnerable to Islamic extremism under the weak leadership of mild and indecisive leaders like Jokowi.

    The premise of the U.S.-Indonesian relationship would thus change, from one of “basically Indonesia has it right, how can we help?” to “basically Indonesia has it wrong, what can we change?” That is a U.S. position that Indonesians have good, historical grounds to fear.

    It would also be completely counterproductive. Not only does it play perfectly into the hands of the Islamists, it would also make it harder to work with a Jakarta security establishment that is already quite sensitive to foreign interference.

    NOTES

    * It seems like Indonesia is always at a crossroads, as Homer Simpson observed. (Here is The Economist explaining the Simpsons mocking The Economist.)

    ** A.k.a. Daes Dae’mar.