The Political Economy of Media Coverage toward the Corruption Scandal in Indonesia

This paper discusses the impact of government advertising and political affiliation of media ownership to the coverage of corruption scandal in Indonesia in 2013 and 2015. There are three theoretical frameworks used in this research, including the propaganda model, the oligarch, and the collusion. These theoretical frameworks, together with the literature, and the empirical evidence construct the model used in this research. For measuring the impact of advertising and political affiliation to the front pages, I use the panel dataset with fixed effect model and Least Square Dummy Variable (LSDV) as the estimator. The finding strongly supports the negative and significant contribution of advertising to the front pages of a corruption scandal. However, the result does not confirm the significant impact of political affiliation to the front pages. The impact of political affiliation to the front pages of corruption is measured by comparing the trend of coverage and the political background of media ownership. The result found that newspaper which has the political affiliation with the government tend to hide corruption scandal than other newspapers without political affiliation.