What happens to the media after the regime changes from authoritarian to the democratic system? Would the media also change accordingly and automatically become free after the regime’s change? Furthermore, what are the forces within and outside the media that influence these changes? This paper aims to review the exiting literatures in the post authoritarian Latin America and Southeast Asia to answer the questions. As a method, this study conducts a critical literature review. This study found that there is agreement among scholars that regime’s change didn’t automatically lead to more free reporting. However, debate is going on about what factors influence the degree of change or continuity with regard to media freedom in post-authoritarian settings. In this regard, scholars have been divided to a theoretical dichotomy. In one hand, there are groups of scholars who believe that political economy factors are the main factors that influence degrees of media freedom. In another hand, there are scholars who believe that cultural factors are more influential. Borrowing the theory of Pierre Bourdie, French sociologists who also concern about this issue, the paper argues that his theory on media’ change can be used as a theoretical framework to examine the media’s changes and overcome the existing theoretical dichotomies.

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Objectivity (unbiased) news is an essential journalism principle in covering political news, especially general elections. However, many studies found that violations against these principles were becoming a problem in many elections in different countries. In Indonesia, most research concerns this issue more focusing on the traditional media platform. This article has aimed to explore online media on how they covered the 2019 presidential election. This research combines quantitative and qualitative text analysis methods to investigate 320 online media articles produced by eight leading online media in Indonesia two weeks before the election. By employing the journalism principle of objectivity, the concept of framing and representation, this research found that online media in Indonesia practice biased journalism in reporting the 2019 presidential election. However, each online media has a typical media bias both quantitatively and qualitatively. This study identified two categories of journalism practice, namely partisan journalism that openly supported particular candidates and at the same time attacked the rival. Secondly, the online media category tried to be professional, but they applied journalism bias by construction framing strategy and representation for the candidate they supported. This research also highlights that the bias of online media journalism was facilitated by the general principle of digital journalism routine in Indonesia that mostly focuses on speed rather than on comprehensive information and also facilitated by the existence of the hyper-link feature that legitimizes the 'cover one side' in a single article.

This research aims to reflect cyber-terror cases in the anti-corruption movement by Indonesian scholars in protest against the revision of the KPK Law in September 2019 and formulates the alternative solutions for anti-corruption activists’ cyber safety in the digital era. Based on focus group discussion with anti-corruption scholar activists and digital ethnography, this research found that, in general, anti-corruption activist prone to cyber-terror, and it weakened their movement. For strengthening the anti-corruption movement in the digital era, this research formulated three alternative solutions, which are: 1) strengthening consolidation of civil society organizations; 2) supporting the formulation of comprehensive cyber regulations; and 3) implementing campus mitigation. Those solutions could be the foundation for fulfilling and guaranteeing anti-corruption activists’ digital rights, especially for the freedom of expression and right to be protected in cyber-space, which is crucial for digital democracy in Indonesia.