This study examines how online media in Indonesia frames the occurrence of floods in Indonesia during the four most significant days of flooding in 2020–2021. Using a quantitative framing approach with holistic techniques, we analyzed 589 news articles from 16 online media outlets in Indonesia. Additionally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with nine journalists from national and local agencies to supplement our findings. Our analysis reveals that online media in Indonesia tends to downplay the role of human activity as a cause of floods while emphasizing the role of nature. We also show that online media commonly employs episodic frames, potentially leading the public to view floods as isolated natural events without any broader context or consideration of human factors. The frame of attribution responsibility was the most frequently employed frame in media coverage, even though it only provided a partial and not comprehensive explanation of the floods. In contrast to many previous studies that demonstrate how the media can extend discussions related to flooding even to policymaking, our interviews shed light that flood news frames are strongly influenced by politics and political economy dimensions: media oligarchy, media centralism, market-oriented mechanism, and the dominance of narratives from official authorities.
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Adiprasetio et al. (2024) studied this question.
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