Representation of Online News Media on People's Demands: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This study examines how Indonesia’s 17+8 People’s Demands were represented in selected English-language online news articles published by Reuters, Tempo English, and The Jakarta Post during September 2025. Although previous Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) studies have investigated political discourse and media representation, further comparative examination of how a specific grassroots civic movement is linguistically constructed across international and Indonesian English-language news outlets may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of protest discourse. Using a qualitative comparative CDA design, this study analyzes nine purposively selected news articles through Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of text, discursive practice, and social practice. The textual analysis focuses on lexical choice, transitivity, and modality, while the discursive and social dimensions are examined through textual evidence concerning source selection, narrative organization, representation of social actors, ideology, and power relations. The analysis identifies different patterns in the selected articles: Reuters emphasizes unrest, political consequences, and institutional responses; Tempo English foregrounds public grievances, civic actors, reform, and accountability; and The Jakarta Post combines the recognition of civic demands with representations of security pressure and legal consequences. These patterns suggest that the movement is constructed through different linguistic and discursive emphases across the selected corpus. The findings contribute to comparative CDA by illustrating how linguistic choices and the representation of social actors shape the meanings attached to a specific civic movement. However, the findings are limited to the nine selected articles and should not be generalized to the overall editorial practices of the three media organizations.