- U.S. funding cuts abruptly ended reporting initiatives on environmental issues in Indonesia, affecting independent journalism outlets like Remotivi, New Naratif and Project Multatuli.
- The loss of nearly $270 million in global journalism support leaves independent media scrambling to cover environmental and human rights issues.
- Shrinking newsroom budgets and government restrictions have already weakened investigative journalism in Indonesia, now worsened by the U.S. aid cuts.
- Facing uncertainty, media groups are pushing to diversify revenue streams and reduce reliance on foreign grants to sustain independent reporting.
Last November, Jakarta-based Muhamad Heychael, program director at nonprofit media organization Remotivi, began offering small grants to local journalists to report on the nickel mines and smelters proliferating in remote corners of Indonesia’s far east.
Heychael and his colleagues chose 10 journalists hailing from places like Morowali on the island of Sulawesi and Obi Island in North Maluku province. Each got 10 million rupiah ($600) — money linked to an earlier USAID grant — to report on the impact the country’s headlong rush to insert itself into the electric vehicle supply chain was having on their communities.
The effort was a small step toward highlighting the pollution, disruption and abuse stemming from the onslaught of secretive Chinese investment in Indonesia’s booming metals sector.
But when U.S. President Donald Trump froze USAID funding in January, Remotivi’s reporting initiative ended as soon as it began, putting at risk coverage of the impact to remote communities from one of fastest-growing sectors of Indonesia’s economy.
U.S. Congress had earmarked nearly $270 million this year to support independent journalism outlets like Remotivi as well as media-related NGOs around the world, funds now halted by the Trump administration.
The loss of those funds, coupled with the decades-long hollowing-out of newsrooms owing to slumping revenue and government curbs on press freedom in the region, will be a boon to polluters who are now less likely to be held to account by reporters.
“Without our efforts, there would be no scrutiny,” Heychael said, referring to remote communities that have seen a surge in metals mining and processing.
As well as Remotivi, independent media outlets including Project Multatuli and media NGO New Naratif say they were blindsided by news that funding, in some cases for work already completed, had suddenly evaporated.
At New Naratif, head of product Bonnibel Rambatan is scrambling to make up for the sudden loss of funding that had been expected to support its regional advocacy for environmental protection, democracy and human rights starting from next month.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which had been a big donor to New Naratif, said this week it was suspending its worldwide sponsorship of some 2,000 democracy groups because it can’t access the money Congress had allocated to the group.
A product of Cold War efforts to push back against Soviet propaganda, the NED was cofounded by Ronald Reagan and dates back to the early 1980s.
That effort appeared to end last month.
The NED had initially assured Bonnibel in late January that Trump’s effort to halt foreign aid wouldn’t impact New Naratif because the money had been given the green light by Congress.
No longer. Adding to the confusion: just weeks earlier the group had learned it had secured funds for an additional six months.
“We have been severely impacted,” Bonnibel told Mongabay, referring to the funding freeze.
“We went from ‘congratulations’ to ‘we don’t know what’s happening to us.’”
At Project Multatuli, the impact of the sudden halt in funds was less dramatic but still head-spinning.
As her reporters, editors and graphics teams were wrapping up work last month on a three-part series on infrastructure and the environment, Evi Mariani, co-founder and director of Project Multatuli, learned the U.S. was yanking nearly half of the funding for the project.
Evi learned that the U.S. State Department, which funded the $17,000 grant — part of a larger effort to support reporting on the environmental impact of Southeast Asia’s building boom — would not transfer the remaining $7,000 it owed.
Evi, a veteran reporter who had previously headed up The Jakarta Post for 18 years, recalled confused phone calls with program coordinators unsure how to proceed, who had suggested at one point Project Multatuli scrap the third, and as-yet-unpublished, story.
The first two stories in the series were a deep dive into the infrastructure and the land acquisition to support the new capital city being built at a cost of $28 billion in East Kalimantan province.
Evi said she salvaged the third story, which will be published later this month.
“Money is one thing, but not allowing us to publish is more serious,” Evi told Mongabay.
Deep roots
Dating back to the 1970s, environmental journalism has a venerable history in Indonesia.
Former strongman president Suharto set up the country’s environment ministry in 1978, in part owing to the attention that environmental issues had earned from reporting by publications including Tempo and later Kompas, according to veteran journalist Andreas Harsono, who is now the Indonesia representative for Human Rights Watch.
But the decline of environmental reporting has tracked the loss of advertising and subscription revenue since the early 2000s.
The country’s mass media industry is controlled by powerful elites, including the MNC Group owned by Perindo Party chair Hary Tanoesoedibjo; the Media Group owned by Nasdem Party chair Surya Paloh; and Visi Media Asia, controlled by the family of former Golkar Party chair Aburizal Bakrie.
Other media interests are controlled by the Lippo Group, owned by the Riady family, and Mahaka Media, owned by Erick Thohir, the minister of state-owned enterprises.
A Reuters Institute survey earlier this year showed 60% of respondents in Indonesia saying they got their news from social media. Less than half said they got their news from television, while only 9% said they got it from print media.
Indonesia has tightened regulations that purport to curb online disinformation and libel.
The Electronic Information and Transactions Law, first passed in 2008, and a new criminal code passed in 2022 have together made criticism of public figures and institutions more treacherous through rules taking aim at defamation and blasphemy.
Indonesia tumbled three places to 111th out of 180 jurisdictions on this year’s democracy index published by Reporters Without Borders.
Independent media and NGOs must move fast to diversify their sources of income, Project Multatuli’s Evi said.
Moves by the U.S. to cut off funding accelerated Project Multatuli’s ambition to rely on its content and communications as well as membership fees for its income by next year — five years since its founding — rather than on big donors.
“From the very beginning we assumed that after five years we would have to replace our big donors,” Evi said.
“We were already prepared. This just heightens the urgency.”
Banner image: A fisherman at the Laa River, North Morowali, cleans clams before selling them. Nickel mines pollute surrounding rivers, affecting remote communities. Image by Iqbal Lubis/The EITI via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Photos: The lives and forests bound to Indonesia’s nickel dreams
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
