Yogyakarta, November 14th 2023─Responding to the important role of the media in welcoming elections, the Center for Digital Society (CfDS) FISIPOL UGM looks at the sentiment of the national media towards presidential candidates ahead of the 2024 elections through research entitled “The Role of Media in the Election Period”. The study was conducted by M. Perdana Sasmita-Jati Karim, Irbah Asfarina, and Emira Anjani (CfDS UGM Research Team) to see the tendency of digital media in publishing articles against one or two parties towards Indonesia’s political party year.
To gain a comprehensive understanding, CfDS collected data on articles published by national media digitally from January 1 2022, to October 10 2023. The media of interest include detik.com, tribunnews.com, kompas.com, cnbcindonesia.com, and cnnindonesia.com. The data obtained was processed using the “data collection” to “work cloud” process. The data includes article headlines that contain mentions of the presidential candidate’s name and the word election, namely “Anies”, “Ganjar”, “Prabowo”, “election”, and “presidential candidate”.
Perdana said, “This research managed to find 47,305 data that showed the dominance of Detik in mentioning the names of presidential candidates with a total of 23,070 articles, followed by Tribun with 15,388 articles, CNN with 5,320 articles, CNBC with 1,793 articles, and Kompas with a total of 1,734 articles.”
Referring to the data obtained, CfDS obtained findings related to unbalanced coverage in the media which reflects sentiments that explicitly or implicitly convey media bias towards one of the interested parties in the 2024 Election.
“The tendency to mention the name of the presidential candidate in the headline of this article then also needs to be further examined regarding the type of negative/positive/neutral sentiment brought by the media to the name of the related presidential candidate,” said Perdana. Based on the data analysis, a different level of tendency was found for each media in giving sentiment towards the name of the presidential candidate through the headline of the article written.
CfDS found that 95% of the average number of articles published by the five media outlets were neutral in sentiment, but there was also a mixture of positive and negative sentiments towards one or two parties.
Still related to the publication of articles by the national media, CfDS found that some articles were problematic because they lacked concrete substantial relevance to the headlines presented. This makes it impossible to accurately identify the sentiment that is raised.
Through the data that has been obtained, CfDS found indications of clickbait journalism carried out by the media on articles related to the 2024 elections that mention the names of certain presidential candidates. “In principle, clickbait journalism is a marketing strategy for digital media to create website traffic. However, this also has the potential to cause errors in the interpretation and consumption of information by the public,” Perdana added.
CfDS concluded that in the run-up to the 2024 elections, the media has structured power and a crucial role in the context of a democratic state. Since the beginning of 2022, five leading national media outlets have actively published news and articles related to presidential candidates with varying frequency and sentiment. Although most of the news is neutral, there are still some articles with both positive and negative sentiments. Through further investigation, several problematic headlines were found and functioned as clickbait. “This shows the need for good digital literacy skills by the public so as not to cause potential misunderstandings in interpreting an article displayed by the media,” Perdana concluded.