The social actor representation reflected on text about Terrorism Published in The Jakarta Post Headlines

ABSTRACT

CDA becomes crucial recently. This is an approach to analyze the text by considering the relation between social practices. More specifically, it is a study on how power is misused or the domination and inequality put into the community through the language aspects. The existence of CDA in this research is to investigate the domination and inequality of social actor especially in media. In this case media has authority to represent a social actor unequally to marginalize other groups. Many kinds of representation of the social actor are represented to create public opinion that ideology could be perceived as logical reality such as in terrorism discourse.

The present research is conducted to answer two questions: (1) what are the strategies of social actor representation reflected on terrorism text in the Jakarta Post Headlines? (2) How are the strategies of social actor representation reflected on terrorism text in the Jakarta Post Headlines? To answer these questions, van Leeuwen’s theory that proposes two strategies of social actor representation is used to discover how exclusion and inclusion strategy are used in media.

Descriptive qualitative approach is employed in this research because the data requires deep understanding and interpretation in the form of description when investigating social actor in terrorism discourse. The data are in the forms of the utterances which contains the strategy of social actor representation. Those data are taken from terrorism text in the Jakarta Post headlines published on September 2012.

This research found two categories of exclusion strategy: passivation and nominalization but there is no substitution of relative clause (adding clause) category. In terrorism text, it uses nine categories of inclusion strategy, namely differentiation, categorization, determination, objectivation, abstraction, identification, assimilation, individualization, and association. The use of those strategies makes exaggeration in terrorism case occurred in big cities and make ideology to the readers’ mind that terrorism leads to radicalism and views as extreme group. Through this research, it also was found new things showing not all social actors who have power in the society can marginalize other groups especially using the passivation and the nomination strategy.

Based on the findings, the future researchers are suggested to do research relevant to the result of the present research on adding clause strategy which is not found in this research. The future research can also use other theory related to media power to represent social actor such as using van Dijk’s theory in superstructure.