International media portrayal of Joko Widodo and protesters in regional election requirement

This research aims to find out how Joko Widodo and Protesters are portrayed in international news related to changes in candidacy rules for regional heads in Indonesia. There are two research questions that answered in this thesis, the first, is how the international news portrays “Joko Widodo” and the second is how the international news portrays “protesters”. This research is a qualitative approach which is a description of critical discourse analysis on the issues discussed. Descriptive qualitative is used in this research to describe the various portrayals of objects that appear in the news. The data obtained from CNA news, BBC news, DW news, VOA news, and Al Jazeera were each entered into the AntConc Corpora tool to easily identify the set of words and their context. The set of words obtained from the news is then analyzed using semantics study to understand and describe the meaning of the word. There are various kinds of portrayals made by the five international media on the object of this research, both positive and negative. This study shows that the international media's depiction of the object “Joko Widodo”, namely, dynastic politics, personal gain acts, power abuse, and downplaying the people, refers to depictions that tend to be negative. The depiction of the protesters refers to more positive nuances, namely, defender of democracy, persistence, freedom of expression, embodiment of unity, Stand up for the common good, and anarchists. From this, the five media almost have the same portrayal of Joko Widodo and the Protesters.