Despite Indonesia’s ‘new era’ of democracy and press freedom, self-censorship is still an essential professional practice of an Indonesian newspaper journalist. Indonesia has a long history of government censorship, in particular governmental pressure to encourage journalists to self-censor their work. As such, self-censorship has been encouraged and promoted through the institutionalised and internalised values of many Indonesian newspaper publications. This paper will explain how the practice has evolved in Indonesia, and how it persists in many newsrooms. While the main agent of pressure during Indonesia’s New Order regime was the government, today it is mostly the owners of newspapers who exert their influence and hinder the autonomy of Indonesian journalists.