Indonesia
Indonesia’s news media operate in a complex political environment shaped by a long democratic transition and ongoing concerns about media independence. Journalists and news organisations continue to face pressures from political actors, business interests, and regulatory frameworks that constrain critical reporting. The growing influence of digital platforms and online creators is reshaping how audiences access and engage with news.
The implementation of President Prabowo Subianto’s Free Nutritious Meals programme, or Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG), caused ripple effects across Indonesian news media. Some media advocacy groups reported incidents of self-censorship and pressure on critical reporting.1 The massive programme, managed by groups close to the president and estimated to cost over Rp 300tr ($18.5bn) in 2026,2 became a focal point of public dissatisfaction with the administration, as accounts of food poisoning, inadequate meals, and widespread graft circulated.
The diversion of state funds to the MBG programme had unintended consequences for the health of news organisations, as government advertising at both the national and provincial levels was significantly reduced. That, coupled with the shuttering of USAID, led to financial hardship for many smaller publications dependent on advertising from either the government or USAID-supported NGOs.
The year 2025 was especially difficult for television news organisations. Although hard numbers are difficult to obtain, there were reports of massive layoffs at major outlets such as Kompas TV, CNN Indonesia, and TVRI. The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) reported that 549 journalists lost their jobs during 2025.3
For many years after the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998 the key media issues in Indonesia were related to securing and institutionalising the freedoms enshrined in the 1999 Press Law. By 2025, however, the central focus had shifted to economic survival. The 2024 Publishers’ Rights Decree (Perpres 23/2024) was widely hailed as a positive step forward, as it sought to address the perceived imbalance between media companies and platforms such as Google, Meta, and X. However, as a ‘decree’, Perpres 23/2024 has been criticised for lacking legal teeth.
Evidence of the disconnect between Perpres 23/2024 and actual practice can be found in Article 3.3 of Indonesia’s Trade Agreement with the US, signed by Presidents Trump and Prabowo in February 2026. The agreement stipulates that Indonesia cannot require ‘U.S. digital services providers (platform services) to support domestic news organisations through paid licenses, user data sharing, and profit-sharing’. Moreover, the agreement allows foreign investment without ownership restrictions in both publishing and broadcasting.4 Not only does this agreement appear to conflict with both the Press Law and the Publishers’ Rights Decree but some media observers noted it was also ironic in light of President Prabowo’s statements in early 2025 attacking Tempo magazine as ‘foreign-funded media’.
Social media platforms such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok are extremely popular in Indonesia, and 64% of Indonesians report getting their news from them. While use of most social media platforms increased, WhatsApp continued to dominate both for news and other purposes, jumping up 13pp to 56% for news.
One of the biggest challenges facing legacy media outlets is the proliferation of what are known locally as ‘homeless’ media, upstart sites on social media that use bots to crawl legitimate news sites and scrape content, at best republishing it in its entirety, at worst sensationalising it so that it is no longer accurate. The spread of these sites has likely contributed to declining trust in media, as some Indonesians are unsure about the difference between legitimate news outlets and the ‘fake news’ offered by homeless media.
Growing concerns about Indonesia’s democratic backsliding have focused on the new Criminal Code, passed in 2022 and set to be implemented in 2026. The Indonesian Press Council has noted that 17 articles have the capacity to threaten press freedom, including bans on insulting the president, the vice-president, state institutions, the flag, and the state ideology of Pancasila.
Journalists’ organisations such as the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) and the Indonesian Association of Cyber Media (AMSI) have not been passive in the face of these legal and economic threats, proposing ideas that include creating a state-funded journalism ‘trust fund’, developing new means of blocking AI crawlers, and revising the Copyright Law to include journalistic content.
In keeping with the global average, 17% of Indonesians pay for online news. Yet, as Tempo’s digital CEO Wahyu Dhyatmika quipped, ‘if only 17% of Indonesians are willing to pay for news, 17% of 280 million is a lot’.
Janet Steele
Professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs, George Washington University
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Social media as a source of news is on the rise, along with the use of AI and video podcasts on all platforms.
Pay for online news
17%
(-1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
37%
(-2)
Trust in news overall
32%
(-4)
Global average: 37%
While overall trust in media declined from 36% in 2025 to 32%, trust in most individual brands has not fallen, suggesting that audiences are more concerned about the broader news environment than they are with specific outlets.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
129/180
Score 43.02
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
