The Recontextualization of Political News Discourse in Jakarta Post’s Articles

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In addition, another work that is most similar to this study is the work of Rycker (2014). He analyzed how post-graduate students do the recontextualization as social practice in their research. The result showed that postgraduate students predominantly recontextualise the practice of “doing research” in terms of “communicating research”. Furthermore, the difference between his study with the current study is the data which is going to be analyze.

Analyzing political news discourse is important as it is one of the main concerns in critical discourse analysis. Thus, political discourse can influence people’s perspective regarding politic issues and politicians themselves. Although it is a possibility for media to persuade people’s mind, spreading its ideology, Van Dijk (1983) argues that whatever the symbolic power of news media, at least some media users will generally be able to resist such persuasion. However, on the other hand, media’s persuasion could be dangerous for people who are sensitively distracted by what media gives them.

- Research methodology

- Research Design

This study employs descriptive qualitative method which “focuses on the issue of particular phenomena which has internal validity and contextual understanding, rather than generalizability and comparability” (Alwasilah, 2003: 143). It means that this study explains the relation of the issue to some aspects such as language, media, representation, and tendency. This research will use a descriptive qualitative approach because it will mainly focus on analyzing, describing, categorizing, and interpreting the data; and after conducting the text analysis, the data will be presented and interpreted qualitatively.

This study intends to describe the issue of language that influences the representation of media, and reveals the tendency regarding language issues to represent the event which is exist in the newspaper article. By this method, the study reveals the representation of two political discourses and the Jakarta Post’s editors’ tendency regarding those interpretations.

A case study, a critical discourse analysis framed by discourse and recontextualization theories, which proposed by Theo Van Leuuwen (2009). As Van Leeuwen (2008) says, the discourse in constructed by the practices because the information about discourse is based on doing—which means that it is based on practices—rather than beings. The argument about the importance of practice instead of being is explained by Van Leeuwen (2009, cited in Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 144) who argues that in the knowledge about what ‘leadership’ is, is based on what the leaders do instead of the state of being a leader.

Van leeuwen (1993) introduces elements of social practice that are transformed when it is represented in a discourse. The elements which are contained in actual social practice are: actions, actors, performance mode, presentation styles, times, space, resources, and eligibility. Among all these elements, the ones which are emphasized in the approach are actors and actions.

Instruments and Data Collection Technique

The instrument of this paper will be documentation—the comparison of two articles in Jakarta Post’s online news media which the topic are political issues. In collecting the data, this paper will utilize a simple technique collection data by taking two articles which are accessed in Jakarta Post.com. The data are written by two authors from Jakarta Post which discussed the hottest political issue in Indonesia.

- Data Analysis

The data analysis procedure will be divided into several steps. First, the researcher will analyze all social actors in the text, this is addressed to answer the first research question. The social actors that are mentioned in the text divided based on the effect of social practices toward them into three categories, and whether it is advantageous or disadvantageous. For instance:

- Agent: The House Council Members

- Patient: Indonesian People, Sudirman Said, Maaruf

- Beneficiary: Setya Novanto

Second, the data will be divided word by word into eight elements which are actions, actors, performance mode, presentation styles, times, space, resources, and eligibility. However, the elements which are emphasized are actors and actions. This is aimed to answer the second research question, which is how the social actors are represented in the text. For instance:

EDITORIAL: FIGHTING RENT SEEKERS

The Jakarta Post | Editorial | Fri, December 04 2015, 8:58 AM

____ = Actor ____ = Timing

____ = Action ____ = Spaces

____ = Performance Mode ____ = Reaction

Thanks to the House of Representatives ethics council members who voted for an open hearing of a misconduct case implicating House Speaker Setya Novanto, the people have seen for themselves that when politics meddles in business, the result may be rent-seeking practices.

The marathon hearings on Wednesday and Thursday will not prove anything until the council reaches a decision, but for the public the question and answer sessions, which were aired live on TV, are enough to demonstrate betrayal of the mandate they entrusted to House politicians in the general elections of April last year.

Suffice to say that the one-and-a-half-hour recording of a conversation between Setya, fuel importer Muhammad Reza Chalid and PT Freeport Indonesia president director Maroef Sjamsoeddin, which was played on Wednesday, indicates not only a gross violation of the House code of ethics, but also trading in influence, which is as a crime under the UN Convention Against Corruption — but which has not yet been adopted in Indonesia’s criminal justice system despite the ratification of the international treaty.

Both Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Sudirman Said, who reported the alleged misconduct to the council, and Maroef told the council Setya was trying to convince Freeport that he could help the company strike a deal with the government for its contract extension, but in exchange for shares in a power plant to be built in Papua to help the company operate a smelter to process its concentrate.

Freeport might be desperately seeking renewal of its contract for another 20 years before the election year 2019, but there is no excuse