Introduction When Indonesia formally joined BRICS in early 2025, it entered a contested global narrative. This paper examines how that narrative was constructed across three distinct media environments: Indonesian domestic outlets, BRICS-affiliated media (Russia and China), and Western outlets (United States, United Kingdom, and France). Methods Drawing on 1,583 English and Indonesian news articles from 30 outlets spanning 2011 to January 2026, we apply XLM-RoBERTa-based sentiment classification and a zero-shot framing pipeline to map emotional tone and dominant storylines across each media cluster. Results Indonesian coverage is overwhelmingly neutral (94.3%), shaped by the country's bebas-aktif doctrine. BRICS-affiliated outlets show a mixed profile-neutral (74.3%) and negative (22.7%). Western media are starkly negative (84.2%) with virtually no positive framing. Economic Pragmatism is the most common frame across all clusters (36.3%–41.2%), but clusters diverge sharply beyond that: Global South Solidarity figures prominently in BRICS coverage (32%), while Geopolitical Risk/Anxiety dominates Western reporting (28.9%). Discussion These patterns track the geopolitical positioning of each media system, illuminating how the same diplomatic event is constructed differently depending on the framing actor. The findings contribute to literature on media framing, global media flows, and the contested meaning of multipolarity.
Resindra et al. (Fri,) studied this question.