THE APPRAISAL OF BIAS AND POWER AS EXPRESSED IN FOUR INDONESIAN NEWS ARTICLES ABOUT INDONESIA NEW HOUSE SPEAKER INAUGURATION

Abstract

This thesis deals with the investigation of the way Indonesian news articles, the Jakarta Post, in informing the issue about the competition in nominating of new house speaker in 2016, between two bickering factions inside Golkar party. The main investigation is to reveal the bias and power enacted by the media to inform this issue. The media tend to gain a support upon one of the factions regarding to the nomination of new house speaker in early 2016. Since it investigates bias as one of the power abuse, this research is conducted under Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) proposed by Fairclough (1989). CDA deals with analyzing the relation between linguistic features enacted and the social context. Relating with the linguistic case, Appraisal theory, proposed by Martin and White (2005) is applied to reveal the linguistics choice enacted in the media. Appraisal is the development of Systemic Functional Linguistics theory, especially in interpersonal meaning, proposed by Halliday. It consists of three sub-sytems which are attitude, engagement and graduation. Those three sub-systems , actually, work simultaneously to determine the meaning conveyed as the choice of the writer in the text. They strengthen each other in the case of giving an amplifying or minimizing as well as postive and negative evaluation. This research is conducted by qualitative method with documentary technique in the form internet based. Meanwhile, the data of this research is four news articles published by the Jakarta Post in the situation before the inauguration of new house speaker in 2016. The articles are in the form of online news daily and it is provided in www.thejakartapost.com. Unfortunately, not all the sentences are analyzed. The selecting of the sentences that serve bias is applied. The total sentences analyzed from these four choosen articles are . The purposive sampling is applied in selecting the sentences that serve of bias-contained. The result of this research are the Jakarta Post bias through enacting acnkowledgment, countership, denial, entertain as part of heteroglossia in engagement system. In addition, the media also employs appreciation and judgment as the attitude system. The use of acknowledgment want to show that the media is neutral with involving the politician from two bickering faction, government and also the law. But the use of denial and entertain weaken the one of the faction, especially from Laksono’s group existence. It, then, amplified with the entertain which deals with giving the possibility upon the Laksono’s exictence. It automatically scalling the authority of Laksono’s group in the low median of graduation. On the contrary, positive appreciation and counter are delivered to Bakrie’s group and government. It assigns that the media gains a support to Bakrie’s group and maitain solidarity upon government. The Jakarta Post itself is founded by Ali Murtopo, the politician of Golkar Party in the new orde. Thus, the media tend to support Golkar as the party which can be the sucessor of new house speaker than the other party in 2016. Besides, one of the editorial head of The Jakarta Post, has installed as new manager in Antara news after the Jakarta Post endorsing Jokowi in presidential election. This media becomes the media which is pro upon Jokowi’s government. The support to Bakrie’s group is given by this media in order to maintain political interest between government and Golkar party. In conclusion, the media of the Jakarta Post bias upon one of the faction between two bickering faction in Golkar party in order to maintain the simbiosis mutualism relationship between government and Golkar party, since the Jakarta Post still has the background from Golkar party as the founder and Bakrie has the powerful figure in Golkar party in backing the financial case. Additonally, the main interest is because political interest between media and the governmental line, since this media also accept the reward from the Government after supporting the Jokowi as the next president in presidential candidate in 2014.