How Indonesia’s Media Became a Business of Politics: New Study Maps Oligarchic Capture in Emerging Democracies

When Indonesia’s New Order regime collapsed in 1998, the country’s press system appeared to be set free almost overnight. Newspapers, radio stations, and television networks that had operated under the tight supervision of Suharto’s authoritarian state suddenly faced a liberalized market, new licensing rules, and a surge of entrepreneurial investment. A quarter of a century later, a new study argues that this celebrated liberalization produced something far more complicated than a free press: a media landscape in which commercial imperatives, political power, and ideological agendas have fused into a durable institutional configuration that the researchers call business media politics.

The study, published in SN Social Sciences by Erman Anom of Universitas Esa Unggul and colleagues from Universitas Syiah Kuala, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, LSPR Communication and Business Institute, and Universitas Malikulsalleh, formally defines business media politics as a configuration in which persistently weak and fragmented regulation institutionalizes the convergence of commercial and political power. Under this arrangement, media organizations operate simultaneously as profit-seeking enterprises, as political actors in their own right, and as ideological instruments serving the interests of their proprietors. The concept is not merely a description of corruption or bias; it is a claim about how regulatory fragility makes this triple role durable and self-reinforcing over decades.

Methodologically, the research rests on an interpretive, document-based single-case design grounded in the political economy of communication. The authors conducted qualitative document analysis of regulatory texts, ownership records, and policy documents, treating these materials as traces of how power is organized rather than as neutral paperwork. This primary evidence was complemented by published content analyses and election-monitoring studies of Indonesia’s 2019 and 2024 electoral cycles, which served as secondary evidence of how ownership structures shape coverage during politically sensitive periods. The document work was then corroborated by semi-structured expert interviews with four senior informants—working journalists, an academic, and a policy analyst—conducted between January and April 2023. The interviews were deliberately assigned a strictly corroborative role, triangulating what the documents already suggested rather than generating new claims on their own.

The central finding is a feedback loop. Regulatory fragility, the authors argue, enables ownership concentration and oligarchic influence; concentrated ownership in turn reinforces commercialization and political capture; and captured, commercialized media exert influence over the very regulatory processes that might otherwise constrain them. Regulation, in this framing, is not an external constraint on media politics but an endogenous arena of media politics itself—the ground on which conglomerates, politicians, and regulators negotiate the rules that govern them. This conceptual move extends the political economy of communication tradition associated with scholars such as Vincent Mosco, which has long examined how economic structures shape communication institutions, by relocating regulation from the outside of the analytical model to its core.

The empirical texture of the study comes from Indonesia’s conglomerate media sector. The authors point to groups such as Kompas Gramedia and Media Group as exemplars of the alignment of editorial agendas with proprietors’ political and economic interests. Indonesia’s media market is famously concentrated: earlier mapping by researchers including Merlyna Lim identified a cluster of roughly thirteen conglomerates controlling much of the national media landscape, many of them owned by families with direct stakes in politics, mining, palm oil, property, or other regulated industries. When a media owner is also a political financier or an industrialist whose businesses depend on government decisions, the boundary between newsroom and boardroom becomes structurally blurred, and editorial independence becomes a matter of ownership arithmetic rather than individual journalistic courage.

The study also traces how this configuration has migrated into the digital sphere. Ministerial Regulation 5/2020, which governs private electronic system operators, extends the same logic of regulatory fragility into platform governance. Under this regulation, digital platforms and content systems are subject to a registration and takedown regime that critics, including the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies in a 2025 policy brief, have characterized as carrying shadows of censorship. The authors argue that the same weak-regulation-plus-oligarchic-influence dynamic that shaped broadcasting now shapes how content is moderated, what remains accessible, and who bears the costs of enforcement in the digital public sphere. In other words, business media politics is not a legacy-media phenomenon; it is being actively reproduced in the platform era.

To situate Indonesia in a wider context, the researchers draw on comparative evidence from the Philippines, India, and Brazil. In the Philippines, scholarship on digital autocratization and disinformation in elections, including work by Arugay and Mendoza, documents how platform dynamics intersect with entrenched media families and populist politics. In India, research on technologised misinformation and Hindutva-linked communication networks highlights how partisan media ecosystems thrive where regulation is fragmented and enforcement is selective. In Brazil, analyses of the so-called Fake News Bill show the difficulty of holding platforms accountable without addressing underlying market concentration. The authors conclude that these dynamics form a wider Global South pattern in which hybrid media systems—combining legacy outlets, digital platforms, and informal political networks—serve oligarchic and political interests under conditions of regulatory weakness.

The theoretical contribution is carefully differentiated from adjacent concepts. Media capture, in the classic sense, describes the takeover of editorial content by political or business interests; instrumentalization describes the use of media as a tool by external actors; and the hybrid media system, as theorized by Andrew Chadwick, describes the interdependence of older and newer media logics. Business media politics, by contrast, names a configuration in which the regulatory order itself is the mechanism that institutionalizes the fusion of commerce and politics. The concept also engages the literature on mediatization—the process by which political actors adapt to media logic, following Strömbäck’s four-phase model—by arguing that in Indonesia the direction of adaptation runs both ways: political actors shape media ownership, and media organizations act as political actors in elections and policy battles.

The authors are candid about the limits of their design. As a single-case, theory-building study, it cannot statistically test whether the Indonesian configuration generalizes; its comparative claims about the Philippines, India, and Brazil rest on secondary sources rather than an original cross-national corpus; and its reliance on published content analyses rather than an original coverage analysis means the evidence of editorial alignment is indirect. The four expert interviews, while valuable for corroboration, cannot substitute for systematic fieldwork. The researchers therefore call for future work to test the propositions advanced here through quantitative and cross-national designs—measuring, for example, whether ownership concentration predicts slanted coverage across electoral cycles, or whether regulatory capacity in different Global South democracies moderates the degree of political capture.

For scholars of democracy, the study’s implications reach beyond media studies. If regulation is endogenous to media politics, then reforms that treat media law as a technical fix—new licensing rules, new content guidelines, new platform regulations—are likely to be absorbed and repurposed by the very configuration they aim to correct, unless the underlying ownership structures and political incentives are addressed. Indonesia’s experience since 1998 suggests that liberalization without pluralism can replace state control not with independence but with a different kind of control, one exercised through markets, family conglomerates, and political alliances rather than through a ministry. As emerging democracies worldwide grapple with platform power, disinformation, and oligarchic influence, the concept of business media politics offers a compact analytical lens for understanding why the press can be simultaneously free, commercial, and captured—and why the three conditions so often travel together.

Subject of Research: Media ownership concentration, regulatory fragility, and political capture in Indonesia's post-1998 media system

Article Title: Business media politics in Indonesia: regulatory fragility, ownership alignment, and the hybrid role of media in emerging democracies

Article References: Anom, E., Rassanjani, S., Samani, M. C., Arrianie, L., & Asnawi (2026). Business media politics in Indonesia: regulatory fragility, ownership alignment, and the hybrid role of media in emerging democracies. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01668-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01668-2

Keywords: Indonesia, media capture, media regulation, ownership concentration, political economy of communication, oligarchy, hybrid media systems, digital platforms, Global South, emerging democracies, mediatization, Ministerial Regulation 5/2020