Wars Within The Story of Tempo an Independent Magazine in Soehartos Indonesia - Softcover

Janet Steele

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9793780088 ISBN 13: 9789793780085

Publisher: Equinox Publishing and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), 2005

Synopsis

For the 23 years prior to its banning on June 21, 1994, Tempo magazine was Indonesia's most important news weekly, and its chief editor, Goenawan Mohamad, one of Indonesia's leading poets and intellectuals. Yet despite its influence, the history of Tempo magazine is not widely known. All aspects of Tempo's history, including its roots in the literary and cultural milieu of the 1960s, its economic organization and management, its internal culture and system of deciding what's news, and its strategies for survival within a repressive press system, provide a window into the political and cultural history of Indonesia's New Order.

Tempo occupied an ambiguous position in Indonesia's New Order, and Wars Within: The Story of Tempo, an Independent Magazine in Soeharto's Indonesia explores these contradictions and paradoxes. Clearly a product of the New Order, Tempo nevertheless presented independent points of view, often at considerable risk. Soeharto's government was never monolithic, and the story of how Tempo managed to survive 23 years of autocratic rule sheds light on the culture and politics of modern Indonesia. It also sheds light on broader questions concerning the role of the press in developing countries -- and on the kinds of negotiation that must go on for an essentially democratic institution to exist in an authoritarian space.

Written in a narrative style, Wars Within utilizes a variety of methods and sources, including participant observation, a content analysis of Tempo's National section, close reading of Tempo's coverage of key episodes including the 1984 incident at Tanjung Priok, previously unpublished archival materials, and over one hundred interviews with the magazine's founders, writers, and contributors. Wars Within is an ideal supplemental text in courses on Southeast Asian history, politics, and culture, as well as in courses on international communication and media studies.

About this title

About the Author

Janet Steele is an Associate Professor of Journalism at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University, and is especially interested in how culture is communicated through the mass media. She is a frequent visitor to Southeast Asia, where she lectures on topics ranging from the role of the press in a democratic society to specialized courses on narrative journalism. She has published articles on media history and criticism in journals such as The International Journal of Press/Politics, Asian Studies Review, Indonesia, Foreign Policy, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Political Communication, Columbia Journalism Review, and The American Journalism Review, and lectured on the theory and practice of journalism as a State Department Speaker and Specialist in India, Malaysia, The Philippines, East Timor, and Bangladesh. A former Fulbright professor in the American Studies program at the University of Indonesia (1997-8), she was awarded a second Fulbright teaching and research grant to Jakarta s Dr. Soetomo Press Institute for 2005-2006. Fluent in Indonesian, she writes a weekly newspaper column called Email from America for Surya daily in Surabaya, East Java.

Review

...Wars Within should be required reading for the armies of Western media trainers currently descending on newsrooms from Morocco to Indonesia in the hope of bolstering media freedom as well as those who fund them. Steele, an associate professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, provides a deft and highly readable account of how Tempo pushed the envelope under an authoritarian regime and emerged as the country s most influential news organization.... --Columbia Journalism Review

...Wars Within is more than an academic account of the rise, fall, and rise of one Indonesian newsmagazine. Based on thorough research, it is engagingly readable, with characters both well-known and those behind the scenes emerging from the pages with the texture of well-crafted fiction. Steele eschews the conventional unfolding of arms-length history to tell the reader of her own interactions with, and attempts to understand, the community and events she unravels for us. Yet the text never lapses into name-dropping. Her insights provide an entrée into the Tempo community, and, through it, a broader understanding of the cultural politics of the New Order. --International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) newsletter

The stand-out news publication in Indonesia in the 1970s-1990s was the famous weekly, Tempo, founded in 1971, banned amid controversy in 1994, and revived after former president Soeharto's fall in 1998. It is still going strong in 2007. Janet Steele's study of Tempo provides a highly readable, informative and evocative account of this magazine's history, set within a wider picture of how the media reported events under stifling pressures to avoid criticism of the regime....This is a powerful book, managing to be personal, analytical, well constructed and a good read -- an excellent introduction to the world of Indonesian press reporting. --Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

Edition details

• Publisher: Equinox Publishing and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 9793780088
• ISBN 13: 9789793780085
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 368