Recently, there has been a wide interest to study how media frame issues in news text which then lead to the understanding of how reality is constructed. This kind of research is believed to provide a important hint in how media promotes certain point of views. According Thonborrow (1999), the mass media deliver information which represent potentially powerful force in our society. In addition, Pan and Kosicki (1993) argue that news text tend to advocate certain ideas and encourage certain ways of processing of the texts. Meanwhile, Scheufele (1999) propounds that, the journalists actively construct frames and makes sense of incoming information.
Despite the importance of the topic, less attention has been paid to how international media frames a particular national figure, the previous research has tended to focus on investigating frames of certain issues or certain national figure addressed by national newspapers.
Therefore, this research aims to enrich the understanding of how international media construct a portrait of a national political figures, in this case the current President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, prior to his election.
Three articles published in BBC, Reuters and New York Times around January 23, 2013 to September 25, 2013 were analysed using Pan and Kosicki’s (1993) framing analysis model. The syntactic, script, thematic and rhetorical structures of the three articles were analysed and interpreted to identify what were the signifying elements used to deliver the story
The findings showed that the three articles studied utilized nearly similar strategies in constructing the portrait of Jokowi. Through the use ofsignifying elements, the journalists made more salient the greatness of Jokowi as a leader by placing it in the lead and as a headline, and the news texts also were presented to shape understanding that Jokowi is a hero rather than a villain. In term of the stylistic choices, words and phrases with positive connotation were more dominantly used. Several strategies also utilized to construct the portrait of Jokowi, namely: claiming empirical facticity or citing empirical data, depicting Jokowi as a hero who standson the side of the little people, accentuating positive tones more than the negative ones, and lastly, telling the readers that Jokowi has worked hard but the problems are extremely difficult.
The present research showed that how media put themselves to support or to reject a particular political figure. In this current study, the journalists made certain facts and images more salient than others, to lead their audiences to process the news articles in certain ways, in this case attempt to endorse Jokowi’s candidacy as president in 2014 election by shaping understanding he might bring Indonesian people to the better future. |