ABSTRACT
Most of the scholarly and journalistic analyses of Suharto’s fall see the transformation as abrupt, as if dissidence suddenly broke through dictatorship. But if control of information and communication is both a characteristic of dictatorship and a means to perpetuate a repressive anti-democratic order, then our analysis of the media shows that cracks in the New Order’s authority appeared much earlier, as global technological changes on the one hand and the contradictions within the New Order’s own principal policies (of political restrictions and economic growth) on the other increasingly put the media beyond the government’s control.
