THE DISCOURSE OF AHOK`S INDEPENDENCY IN JAKARTA GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION: A STUDY OF APPRAISAL

Abstract

The research analyses about the discourse of Ahok`s independency which is announced at 7 of March 2016. Ahok`s independency occurs because of the dissatisfaction of reform-minded young people who are united as Teman Ahok (the term of volunteers) upon political parties which mostly cannot be relied anymore. Therefore, Teman Ahok escorts Ahok to run as an independent candidate in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election. Spountaneously, the decision creates many reactions from many sources whether they agree or disagree, endorse or criticize upon this event. Hence, the researcher selects three electronic newspapers: The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Globe, and Giv News, to reveal the attitude of the journalists in presenting the news about Ahok`s independency. The main goal of this research is to uncover the real attitude of the journalists in presenting the news. Therefore, there are two questions designed to achieve the goal. First, to find out how the language reflects the attitude of the journalists. Second, to find out how the journalists express their attitude toward the readers. In order to answer these questions, the researcher applies Appraisal theory which is proposed by Martin and White (2005). This theory focuses on analysing the feeling or emotional reaction of the journalists through the three elements of appraisal theory: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The results of the selected data: The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Globe, and Giv News reveal that the journalists mostly use aknowledgment, judgment, force and focus in presenting the news. The journalists mostly apply aknowledgment through engaging the external voice in order to hide their attitude upon the readers and also to strengthen their opinion upon the proposition which is being discussed. Under judgment which deals with moral assessment of behaviour, the journalists apply positive and negative judgment through adjective, modal adjunct, verb, noun phrase, and adverbs. Under force sub-category which deals with the degree of evaluation, the journalists use intensification and quantification which belong to median and high-scaled in order to enhance the reader`s agreement upon the information which is presented in the news. Meanwhile, under focus, the journalists only use sharpening in high-scaled in order to strengthen their alingment or disalingment in presenting the news. In more specific, according to the results of each data, The Jakarta Post through its lexical choice mostly shared the word risky, dismiss, pressure, not easy, a lot at stake, in describing Ahok`s independency which relate to a criticism of the journalist upon Ahok`s independency. Conversely, in Jakarta Globe and Giv News, the journalists mostly employed the lexical choice through the word leading compared, accesible, the most popular, against political parties, ideal leader which relate to the agreement of the journalists upon the decision of Ahok. Thus, it can be concluded that through mass media, the journalists want to share their opinion to the readers about this heated news of Ahok`s independency. However, the way of transfering the opinion is not in explicit way. Therefore, as a reader, we have to read the news in a critical way so that we can comprehend what is actually behind the language used.