Satire and humor in Indonesian political culture (negotiating government critisim in digital journalism)

Introduction Political humor has increasingly become an important element of public communication in the era of digital journalism. Although numerous studies have examined humor as a means of criticizing political power, most of this scholarship has focused on individualistic societies and non-institutional media such as social media platforms. This study aims to analyze how humor, irony, and satire are utilized in Indonesian digital journalism as strategies of indirect political criticism within a collectivist cultural context. Methods This study employs a qualitative content analysis approach to examine 38 news articles drawn from 29 media outlets. The analysis was conducted using NVivo software 14 to identify thematic patterns and discursive strategies embedded in political news texts. Results The findings indicate that humor in digital journalism appears in various forms, including irony, satire, and hyperbole, functioning as a symbolic mechanism for expressing criticism toward government policies and the behavior of political elites. The results also demonstrate that humor is not merely used as a stylistic rhetorical device but is integrated into journalistic narrative structures, including writing style and journalists’ narrative commentary. Within a collectivist cultural context, the use of humor is closely associated with facework strategies that enable media institutions to deliver criticism while avoiding direct confrontation, particularly through avoiding, compromising , and integrating communication styles. Humor also plays a role in the framing of political issues, particularly in defining problems and providing moral evaluations of the actions of political actors or elite policies. Discussion Theoretically, this study extends the concepts of collectivism and face negotiation from the domain of interpersonal communication to the broader sphere of media discourse and political journalism. The findings also contribute to the literature on political humor by offering insights from a non-Western context, particularly within the practices of Indonesian digital journalism.