The Representation of Blame in Two Selected Articles of The Jakarta Post towards Flooding Issue in South Kalimantan: An Ecolinguistic Study

Abstract

This study investigates the blame practice represented in one of Indonesia’s English newspapers, The Jakarta Post. This study aims to dismantle the blame practice enacted in its two selected articles reporting the flooding issue occurred in South Kalimantan in January 2021. This study is qualitative research to employ 14 utterances as the data selected from two articles. In doing so, the analysis is under Ecolinguistics as proposed by Stibe (2015) with the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis of Van Dijk’s model (2015) as well as Speech Acts by Austin (1962) and Illocutionary Acts by Searle (1979) as the linguistic tools to analyse the action carried in the locution expressed by the participants in the articles. The result shows that blame practices is proven carried in the two selected articles through the language use on how the journalists represent the members of in-group and the members of out-group. The speech acts and ideological discourse analysis found that forms of discriminatory context models in the articles are resulted from the elite’s mental models formed from social-political affairs that further underlie The Jakarta Post reporting flooding issue happened in South Kalimantan. As a result, the shared attitude, knowledge, and goals are manifested in the news articles to sustain anthropocentrism by laying blame on flooding as the cause of human welfare destruction and normalizing the human domination over nature.