Social actor representation in human trafficking issue as reported in Jakarta Globe

ABSTRACT

Social actor representation, as one of CDA framework, in mass media has significant influence to the readers‟ mind. It is a sensitive approach to know how a certain group is marginalized in a discourse. The text producers may share the ideology through media. Through discursive strategies of excluding and including social actors, the ideological manipulation in mass media can be examined as the proposed study.

This research is an attempt to answer two research questions: (1) What are the strategies of social actor representation used in reporting human trafficking issue in Jakarta Globe? (2) How are the strategies of social actor representation used in reporting human trafficking issue in Jakarta Globe? To answer the research questions, I analyze the data based on CDA of Social Actor Representation proposed by van Leeuwen to reveal the interest of the text producers.

I use descriptive qualitative as my research design. The data are analyzed through: (1) taking the data and reduce them to certain categories, (2) presenting the context, (3) interpreting the findings critically to inspect categories of Theo van Leeuwen‟s (2008) social actor representation.

Based on the analysis, I conclude that the journalists of Jakarta Globe regarding this issue use the exclusion and inclusion strategies to exaggerate phenomena. The writers want to get the best empathy from the readers, especially the government to take the immediate action. The findings reveal that the writers represent injustice activity done by Malaysian towards Indonesian. The strategies of inclusion are used to represent or label Malaysian as brutal and inhuman side. Indonesian government, however, is represented in a bad way. Indonesian government is represented intensively as the unreliable party. After finding discursive strategies by employing van Leeuwen‟s model of CDA, I conclude that this media tends to take a side of the victims by shaping people‟s empathy through language.

Based on the findings mentioned above, I suggest the next researchers to use collaboration of the theories such as van Leeuwen (2008) and Halliday (2004) of transitivity to provide deep information of the verb process to strengthen van Leeuwen‟s theory.