Media representation of indonesia in the sydney morning herald from 2004 to 2009 1

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CHAPTER 1
Introduction and Theoretical Perspectives

1.1 Introduction to Thesis
This study deals with media representations constructed by one country’s
newspaper about another country. In particular, it examines how Indonesia was
represented in one Australian broadsheet, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH),
from 2004 to 2009. This chapter discusses the motivation, the research questions,
the purpose and the theoretical perspectives of this study.

1.1.1 Motivation for the Study
This study takes the perspective that what gets reported in the news should not be
understood as the same as what actually happened. Rather, it is the author’s
version of what happened. The news about an event should be distinguished from
the event itself (van Leeuwen, 2008), because it has undergone
recontextualization processes of being selected and made relevant and appropriate
to the news discourse (Fairclough, 2003; van Leeuwen, 2008). It has also been
framed in such a way (D’Angelo and Kuypers, 2010, Johnson-Cartee, 2005) due
to the writers’ knowledge, experience, ideology, culture, and purpose of writing.
In this process, some participants in the event may be foregrounded while some
others backgrounded in the news, and their actions dramatized or generalized.
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Above all, reporters may also share their own judgments or opinions about the
event, the participants and their actions.
News representation, that is, the portrayal or construal of people and events in the
news, is a complicated matter. Representations that reporters make in the news
can be explicit or implicit, and not all readers are able to interpret them accurately
because they also have different background knowledge, experience, exposure

levels, and purpose of reading. Readers tend to accept and believe what is reported
in the news, because they realize they are limited by distance and access to the
events. Readers may not realize that news reports are only the reporters’
representations about the events; that’s why, different reporters produce different
representations of the same people and events. Nevertheless, news has become
pervasive in human’s life (Alterman, 2003), and the effects of news have
significantly influenced all segments of life. From politics (e.g., Graber, 2011),
economy and business (e.g., Cai, 2011), education (e.g. Buckingham, 2000) and
environmental education (e.g., Stevenson and Dillon, 2010) to the more mundane
day-to-day interests of people such as the weather, fashion, transportation, food
and health, most human activities are influenced by the latest news. Journalists
claim that they report the event as real as it is, are objective and balanced, and
avoid biased reporting. However, informed readers or media analysts have found
evidences of explicit and implicit misrepresentations in the news, for example,
those towards women (e.g., Stevens-Gupta, 2011; Merskin, 2011), minority
groups (e.g., Harding, 2006; Merskin, 2011; Richardson, 2004a; Pietikainen,
2003; van Dijk, 2000), immigrants (e.g. KhosraviNik, 2009), ethnic or religious
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groups (e.g., Richardson, 2004b), the disabled (e.g., Darke, 2005), and the ageing
(e.g., Bailey, 2010).
Most of these studies dealt with news representations of certain groups of people
living in the same community with the reporters and the readers. They were
negatively represented in the news media and treated as an ‘out-group’ against
another group assumed to be the mainstream society such as male, employed,
healthy, active and of ethnic majority. This condition is characterized as racism in
the media (e.g., van Dijk, 2000; Richardson, 2004b). Such negative depiction in
the news may generate racism in the society, because news can construct public
opinion (Lippmann, 1922 [2007]). Racist representations of minority groups may
influence the readers’ and society’s perceptions about those groups. Not only that,

soon the negative stereotypes in the news can result in racist behaviors towards
those groups and unfair treatment and discrimination from the mainstream
government and lawmakers towards them. For example, the negative
representations in some British newspapers and tabloids about Asian immigrants
living in Britain caused racist behaviors of the local British people towards those
immigrants (e.g., KhosraviNik, 2009).
This study, however, aims to analyze the media representation about a foreign
country, namely, representations in an Australian newspaper about Indonesia.
Physically, Australia and Indonesia are separated by the Indian Ocean, which is
each country’s border. Socially, they are separated and develop in different
cultures. Concerning the effects of the news, what is reported in Australia about
Indonesia will shape the perceptions of the Australian readers, including the
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government officials and people, about Indonesia. For example, following the
footage in ABC news about the inhumane slaughtering of Australian cattle in
Indonesia’s abattoirs in 2011 (
s3441902.htm), the Australian government suspended the export of Australian
cattle to Indonesia for some time.
In the cross-border contexts such as in the case of Australia and Indonesia where
the border is an ocean, however, the Indonesians in Indonesia may not be directly
affected by its negative representations in the Australian news. Negative
stereotypes about Indonesia may be formed and may affect some Indonesians
living in Australia and interacting with Australians, but the media effect will not
be as strong and direct as that in the same-community context. Thus, some
concepts in media representation studies need to be adapted in order to more fully
appreciate cross-border representations.
In the process of representing another country or culture, reporters perceive that
country or culture through their ‘cultural goggles’ (Nesbitt, 1971). This means
they interpret the social practices they see in that country through their own

cultural codes. In case of Australia and Indonesia, what happens and commonly
done in Indonesia are observed through the western standard, and this is greatly
different from the Indonesian or particularly Javanese traditions which the
reporters see during their assignment in Indonesia. In construing Indonesia in the
news, the reporters put Indonesia as the object of representation which they share
to the Australian readers. Both reporters and readers share the same cultural codes
which they use to interpret and evaluate events in Indonesia. The interpretation by
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Australian readers will definitely different from that of Indonesian. Indonesians
who do not read Australian newspapers may not know that they have perhaps
been ‘misrepresented’ (presented in a wrong or negative way) so they could not
counter it. Although Australian journalists may not do so on purpose, the pattern
is the same: negative stereotypes of Indonesians tend to be recycled among
Australians from generation to generation (Freedman, 2000).
This study is also motivated by personal experience. As an Indonesian studying in
Australia under the Australian Government’s scholarship, and then teaching
Australian Studies upon returning to Indonesia, I have been reading Australian
newspapers and have become more interested in reading their news on Indonesia.
I was often struck by the negative images of Indonesians reported for the
consumption of Australian public. On one hand, I cannot say that those
representations were not true because I saw similar events or read about them in
the local press. On the other hand, there is a danger of constantly presenting
predominantly negative representations about Indonesia to non-Indonesian
readers. Over time Australian readers may build biased stereotypes of Indonesia,
because they may never visit Indonesia, get to know Indonesians personally or
experience living in the country themselves. They rely only on these mediated
representations written by Australian correspondents for their ideas of Indonesia
and Indonesians. In terms of future bilateral relationships, such a situation may
prove detrimental.

As discussed earlier that news representation is a complicated matter, in foreign
media representations the complication is more intense due to the different
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cultural codes used to interpret a foreign culture. Studies on foreign media
representation are even very rare. After using search engines and accessing the
websites of several universities and libraries, I found only two studies on foreign
media representation. One was conducted by Wasburn (2002), who analyzed how
the United States of America was politically represented in Japanese, Indonesian,
British, French, Canadian and Russian print and electronic media. He concluded
that the representations of the US in the media of other countries were very much
influenced by the political and historical contexts of the country’s relationships
with the US. For example, in the Japanese media the US was perceived as a
business competitor, in the Indonesian media as the world police (in a negative
sense), in the Russian media as a former enemy, and in the British, French and
Canadian media as a far-away friend. Such representations were very general and
referring to the country or government only. My study, on the contrary, analyzes
the foreign media representations of different kinds of people of another country:
from the presidents to the scavengers.
The other study was Mahony (2006, 2010a, 2010b) which focused on the
construction of Indonesian Islam in Australian news in the context of ‘war on
terrorism’. While my research topic is similar to hers, Mahony limited her
subjects to muslim Indonesians only. In Australian news after the series of
bombings in Indonesia in 2002-2005, especially the Bali bombing in 2002 and the
bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004, unsurprisingly there was a
very negative sentiment towards Islamists. Since then Australia supported the
United States of America’s programs in fighting terrorism. Thus, framed and
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perceived within a skewed context from the outset, the news representations of the

Islamists were understandably negative.
The present study, however, wishes to observe a relatively unbiased outsider’s
perception and representation of Indonesia. That is why the chosen news for this
study are about Indonesia’s domestic issues which the Australians had no vested
interest. Moreover, the Indonesians analyzed in the news are from all walks of
life, from presidents and government officials, to food vendors and other ordinary
Indonesians, including the Islamists. This study attempts to see the representations
of Indonesia which are constructed from a set of diverse issues, in order to avoid
the bias of particular topics, such as the Islamists and the war on terrorism.
The data were gathered from The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) from 2004 to
2009. SMH is the mainstream broadsheet published and distributed mainly in
Sydney and the New South Wales. Among approximately one-hundred texts on
Indonesia published each year in SMH, this study selected only articles about
Indonesia’s national, domestic, social and cultural issues, and excluded news
about Indonesia but relating to Australia and those affecting Australia-Indonesia
relations. Thus, articles on bilateral disputes, such as East Timor, Papua, asylum-
seekers, Bali Nine (nine Australian drug mules arrested and imprisoned in Bali),
Shapelle Corby (jailed for bringing marijuana into Indonesia), the prosecution and
execution of the Bali bombers, or Merauke Five (five Australians without visas
stranded in Papua) were not selected. The decision was made because the
representations of Indonesia in such news articles may be characterized by what
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van Dijk called ‘ideological square’ (van Dijk, 2000). Applied to news items in
Australia, this means that the Australian newspaper, like any writer or speaker,
will emphasize the good of ‘self’ and the bad of ‘others’, and de-emphasize the
bad of ‘self’ and the good of ‘others’.
Concerning controversial political issues, many scholars in political science from
both countries have discussed and debated these, for example, Silalahi (1991),
Evans (1995), Aspinall and Fealy (e.g., 2010), Lindsey (e.g., 2000), Crouch (e.g.,

2010), and Mietzner (e.g., 2006, 2009). Linguistic and media studies research on
Australia and Indonesia relations are, on the contrary, very few, although
language, news and the media are integral materials in the studies of political,
bilateral relations. Thus, this study attempts to fill the linguistic and media gap in
the collection of studies about Indonesia and Australia.
This study decided to observe news representations of Indonesians in Australian
press from social, cognitive and cultural perspectives. In particular, the social
perspective is based on Fuller (2010) and Schudson (2003), the cognitive and
sociocognitive perspectives follow van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), and van Dijk
(1988a, 1988b, 2008), and the cultural perspective follows Berkowitz (2011) and
Zelizer (1997). These theoretical perspectives, which will be discussed in Section
1.2., show that news representation invites multi-interpretation from the readers
and thus need a multi-perspectival approach to analyze. Therefore, this study also
attempts to propose a linguistic framework towards analyzing news
representations which take into consideration the Indonesian news actors and the
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Australian reporters who produced the representations. The framework, consisting
of three analyses of ‘news actors’, ‘news actions’ and ‘author evaluation’, will be
presented in Chapter Three.
The term ‘news actor’, adapted from van Leeuwen’s (2008) ‘social actor’,
specifies the social actors in the news articles. ‘News action’, also adapted from
van Leeuwen’s (2008) ‘social action’, deals with the actions of the news actors
which get reported in the news. The ‘author evaluation’ framework, following
Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal system, analyzes the reporters’ comments or
opinions about the news actors and their actions which they communicate to the
readers. Their opinions are categorized into a number of aspects of evaluation and
whether the evaluation is expressed explicitly or implicitly. In general, the
reporters’ opinions about news actors and their actions mainly frame the whole
representations they produce in the news. Because the first and the second

analyses deal with personal attributes and behaviors of the news actors, and the
third analysis deals with the reporters’ opinions or comments about the actors, the
proposed three-dimensional analytical framework complement each other in
observing representations of news actors and their actions in the news.

1.1.2 Research Questions
The main research question to be answered in this study is how Indonesia is
represented in the selected news articles published in The Sydney Morning Herald
(SMH) from 2004 to 2009. This question will be investigated by examining how
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Indonesian news actors and their actions are verbally portrayed by the Australian
reporters in the news articles and what the reporters ‘say’ about them.
In particular, this study will answer the following questions:
1. How are Indonesian news actors represented in the Australian newspaper?
2. How are their actions represented in the newspaper?
3. In what aspects of evaluation are the news actors and their actions mainly
represented in the newspaper?
By answering these questions, this study hopes to characterize the representations
of Indonesia and/or Indonesians in the Australian newspaper. These news actors
are categorized based on the levels of their political involvement; thus, the objects
of representation are the presidents and some presidential candidates, the
government officials, and the ordinary people of Indonesia.

1.1.3 Purpose of the Study
This study aims at finding out how Indonesian news actors were portrayed in the
Australian newspaper in 2004-2009. As studies in media representations about
another country are rare, this study hopes to contribute towards understanding
the dynamic and complex negotiations involved in representing a foreign country
in one’s news. In the Australia-Indonesia context, studies on one country’s news

media about the other country were also very few, and thus the findings of the
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analysis would add to the mosaic of images and perceptions about each other. It
is hoped that this would contribute towards improving mutual understanding
between these neighbouring countries.
This study also develops a framework for foreign media representation which
consists of three domains: the news actors, the news actions and the author
evaluation. Equipped with this framework, this study will observe the news
representations of Indonesians in terms of their representations as persons,
through their actions, and from the reporter’s opinions about them.
The next section discusses the theoretical perspectives that are used to understand
the news production and comprehension processes. These perspectives are
relevant to critical discourse analysis, the research approach of this study. These
perspectives also support the application of the three-domain analytical
framework.

1.2 The Theoretical Perspectives of the Study
This study decided to observe news processes from the social, cognitive and
cultural perspectives because of three interrelated factors. First, news circulates in
a social context involving writers, that is, reporters and/or editors, and readers or
audience in the society. Second, news writing and reading are cognitive activities
of the reporters and the readers who shape and are shaped by their personal, social
and cultural environments. And third, the effect or result of news articles reflects,
shapes and is shaped by the social and cultural contexts where news circulates.
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This study argues that studies on news, including news representation, need to
take these three factors into account in order to clearly understand the roles and
influences of news in society.

As stated, news processes are those involved in the production and comprehension
of news. Prior to being able to produce a representation of an event in the form of
news articles, reporters as members of a society receive all forms of inputs from
other members of that society in three ways. These include the informal
education from parents and relatives, the formal education at school, university
and probably a formal journalism training, and the non-formal learning such as
watching or reading news, discussions with friends, and watching films and
documentaries. From all of these sources of information reporters build their
understanding of the world around them. Following the social-cognitive view, the
production of news begins with an event happening in a community or society
(e.g., Berkowitz, 1997), then the event gets cognitively internalized by the
reporters (e.g., van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983) and the result is offered back to the
community in the form of news. Thus, the whole process of producing and
comprehending news in the society runs in a spiralling mode, meaning that the
news article produced and comprehended will become the input of other people
and news writers in further cycles.
The theoretical foundation of this perspective is adopted from the cognitive
psychological concepts of discourse comprehension proposed by van Dijk and
Kintsch (1983), Kintsch (1998), van Dijk (e.g., 1988a, 1988b, 1998a, 1998b,
2008); the sociological concepts of news by Schudson (2003), and Berger and
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Luckmann (1966[2011]); the classic sociological views of news by Lippmann
(1922 [2007]), Fishman (1980) and Gans (1979); and journalism studies by
Zelizer (1997, 2009), Shoemaker et al (2009), and Tumber (1999).
The first perspective of news processes is the social perspective. Following
Zelizer (1997), news is basically a form of communication between the reporters
or newspaper and the readers or members of a society. Based on Jakobson’s
communication model (Lacey, 1998), the reporter is the sender of the message,
and the readers or society is the receiver of the message. Understanding this mode

of relation will improve the readers’ media literacy (Potter, 2011) because what is
written in the news is understood as not the exact ‘reality’, but as the reporter’s
perception or version of reality which he/she offers or communicates to the
readers. It is evident when readers compare several news accounts of the same
event in different newspapers. They will find different versions in terms of
naming, categorizing, identifying causality and other aspects of the event, as the
result of recontextualization process. The exception is when newspapers publish
news accounts bought from international news agencies such as the Reuters, AP,
UPI, and AFP. The published articles in different newspapers in different
countries will relatively follow the agencies’ representation.
Reporters also function is a social context where they experience social forces
and social constraints in relation to their profession. According to Molotch and
Lester (1999: 38), the social processes of news production and comprehension
involve a number of participants. They are the ‘news promoters’ – the goverment
officials, and business and social organizations; the ‘news assemblers’ – the
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reporters; and the ‘news consumers’ – the readers or audience, who may include
government officials and organizations too. Each group has its own goals in
dealing with news, and reporters as the news assemblers do not just gather news
(Johnson-Cartee, 2005). While catering to the needs of the other groups, they also
promote their own idealism and social agenda.
A news article is thus produced not like a blog entry which is very personal in
content and writing style, but constrained by ethics and journalism standards. The
reporters’ personal knowledge, ideologies and intentions play an important role in
the writing process, and in producing their news articles they follow the standard
rules and conventions of their news organization (Allan, 2004). At the same time,
they also take the social and cultural conventions of the readers into consideration.
In doing so, reporters will frame their news reports in such a way that is
‘attractive’ and acceptable to the news organization, the news promotors and the

news consumers.
Reporters and editors have been familiar with the concepts of news values or
newsworthiness such as the well-quoted news values proposed by Galtung and
Ruge (1965), who said that only events with more than one news value or a
distinctive value which attract readers and advertizers will get published.
Furthermore, following Berger and Luckmann (1966[2011]), news is a ‘social
construction of reality’ and it is incorrect for readers to assume that news reflects
the ‘reality out there’ as it is (Caldas-Coulthard, 2003). Berkowitz (1997),
discussing the social meanings of news, confirms that the role of reporters in
shaping the news is based on the social factors around them such as the agreed
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work procedure (in relation to their news organization), attaching certain values to
the news events in the news framing process, and inevitably coloring their news
with ‘their socially learned beliefs about society and how the world works.’
(1997: xii). Thus, the ‘reality’ reported in the news should be understood and
accepted as a ‘symbolic reality’, and the ‘world out there’ as a ‘symbolic
universe’ (Wasburn, 2002: 58).
Summarizing several concepts of news processes from Schudson (2003),
Berkowitz (1997), Zelizer (1997) and van Dijk (1988a, 1988b), I present
diagrammatically the news processes that take place in the social context and at
the cognitive level. Figure 1.1 shows how news circulates from the society to the
reporter (Process 1), the information is then cognitively internalized in the
reporter’s mind (Processes 2 – 4) and further, representations are produced by the
reporter and shared to the society (Process 5).The resulting news representations
will become information input for other persons (Process 6) and new cycles of
these news processes will take place again.
The cognitive model in Figure 1.1 is based on discourse comprehension and
production processes (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983; Kintsch, 1998; van Dijk,
1988a, 1988b, 1998), and mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983, 2006; Garnham,

1999a, 1999b; Sanford and Moxey, 1999) as explained in cognitive psychology
and artificial intelligence.

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❷ ❸ ❹


❺ 

❶
❺

❻


Social context

Figure 1.1 Comprehension–Representation Processes of News

As seen in Figure 1.1, reporters should be able to perceive and comprehend
(Process 2) the external inputs (Process 1) around them through their senses.
Thus, the social context is seen to significantly influence the reporters in the
beginning of this cognitive process. Some of these inputs are ignored and passed
by, but certain inputs will be identified, noted and remembered. The latter will
form the reporters’ mental representation (Process 3) in their memory or
knowledge bank. Processes 2 and 3 are two-way processes as some scholars are
convinced that human beings can perceive the inputs from the world around them
COMPREHENSION
RECEIVING
- perceiving
- sensing
- identifying
- interpreting

DATA/INFO:
- verbal
- visual, auditory,
olfactory,
- physical
- material
- sense data
= the world

REPRESENTATION:
PRODUCING/
RE-PRODUCING
- expressing self and
others: feelings, thoughts,
opinions
- evaluating
- describing
- reporting
- creating

PRODUCTS:
- ideas
- visual
- verbal
- acts: body language,
-movement,
action
- materials
INTERFACE:
MENTAL
REPRESENTATION
- interpretation
- inference
- knowlege (frame,
script)
- experience

COGNITIVE
SYSTEMS

- conceptualizing
- feeling
- analyzing
- evaluating
- comparing
- believing
questioning
COMPREHENSION – REPRESENTATION PROCESS
new:
knowledge
norms, values
stereotypes
commonsense
ideologies
beliefs
identities
relationships
expectations
sensations
current:
knowledge
experiences
ideologies
beliefs
identities

Cognitive process
❷
❸
❹

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because they already have some concepts in their mind about that input (van Dijk
and Kintsch, 1983).
Mental representation (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983; Kintsch,1998; van Dijk,
1981) has been discussed and debated very intensively in cognitive psychology,
artificial intelligence and psychology. Scholars have used several terms with more
or less similar concepts in theories ranging from frame theory (Minsky, 1988),
script theory (Schank and Abelson, 1977), scenario (Sanford and Garrod, 1981),
schema theory and schemata (Rumelhart, 1998; Bartlett, 1932), mental models
(Johnson-Laird, e.g., 1983, 2006; Garnham, 1996, 1999a, 1999b) to text-world
theory (Gavins, 2007). In essence, mental representation is perceived as the
backbone of the storage of knowledge or memory in human minds. This is where
human beings create their internal ‘reality’ or ‘their world’ (Webb, 2009). Each
‘reality’ will be maintained until they receive further external inputs on which
they may decide to change, sustain, confirm or strengthen the current ‘reality’ that
they have adhered to so far. This concept is consistent with the process of
producing and interpreting representations later discussed in 2.1.
Mental representation is not a fixed and rigid structure. On the contrary, it is
flexible and multilayered (van Dijk and Kinsch, 1983), partitioned (Dinsmore,
1991), and multileveled (Kintsch, 1998). Dinsmore (1991) in fact divides mental
representations based on spaces for certain categories such as belief spaces, hope
and wish spaces, possibility spaces; fictional, dream and pretense spaces; spaces
representing specific places, times and situations; and some others. Kintsch (1998)
and van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) agree that there are different sections in mental
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representations but describe these based on the cognitive and conceptual skills
that these representations perform, because mental representations are seen as
“forming a hierarchy of abstractness and increasing independence from the

environment” (Kintsch, 1998: 16). In other words, the higher the level of mental
representations is, the more abstract and complex it is from the material data.
Specifically, Kintsch (1998) explains five levels in mental representations. The
first or the lowest level consists of the direct procedural and perceptual
representations which capture different types of affordances, abilities, actions and
biological mechanisms. It is dependent on the external environment and can be
modified through learning and training. The second level is composed of the
episodic representations which store memories about events and sequences of
events. The third level is made up of the non-verbal, imagery and action
representations which store images, emotions and attitudes. This representation
level needs an established social community as a prerequisite for its representation
to function. The two highest levels consist of the verbal or linguistic
representations and are independent from the environment. One level is useful in
processing narrative and oral representations, and the other is the highest and
most complex level which deals with abstract representations, such as logical
thought, formal argument, deduction, quantification and formal measurement. To
comprehend news and understand the ‘world’, a person will need to effectively,
flexibly and strategically utilize his/her mental representation at all levels
(Kintsch, 1998).
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Over time, the mental representations will shape reporters into individuals with
certain skills, knowledge, norms, values, beliefs, understanding of identities and
relations, ideologies, stereotypes, commonsense, expectations, personalities and
so on. When they produce comments, responses, opinions, or reports, they
activate their mental representation in processes of moving forward and backward
at these cognitive stages. Finally, the news reports that they write are the material
representation or reproduction (Process 4) of the whole cognitive process of
comprehension and representation of that event (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983). At
this stage, reporters would combine their internal reality with the external inputs

and reality from around them to produce a piece of representation which can be
accepted and understood by news consumers in the society. When news is
distributed to consumers (Process 5), the process takes place in the social context
again, and the result representations become inputs for other individuals in the
society. Therefore, news comprehension and representation processes form a
spiralling movement, and both happen in an individual’s mind, in the society and
across generations.
The social and cognitive, or ‘sociocognitive’ (van Dijk, 1988a, 1988b, 1998b,
2008), perspectives of news processes discussed above is relevant to the research
approach, that is, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and the analytical framework
of this study, that is, the news actor, news action, and author evaluation
frameworks. They are also consistent with the representation-making process
discussed in Chapter Two. First, these perspectives effectively accommodate
some CDA tenets that become the foundation of this research. One of them is the
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three-dimensional analysis of Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995b) which clearly puts
discourse within its social context, and thus, the social structures, social relations
and identities, and social practices involved in the production and consumption of
Australian news about Indonesia need to be involved in the analysis. News
discourse is a product of a society, and the social forces and social structures
shape the society in which news articles circulate. Another tenet of critical
discourse analysis for this study is the recontextualization process of social
practices. Van Leeuwen (2008) stated that discourse is a recontextualization of
social practices, while discourse itself is a social practice. Thus, news discourse
cannot be analyzed separately from the surrounding social practices. The other
tenet is from van Dijk (1988a, 1988b, 2008), who also consistently maintained
that discourse and society are interrelated. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983)
specifically stated that, “Discourses such as stories do not occur in vacuo. They
are produced and received, by speakers and listeners, in specific situations within

a wider sociocultural context” (1983: 6). These tenets of CDA will be further
discussed in the next chapter.
Second, the sociocognitive perspectives are relevant to the three-part analytical
framework. The first and the second analyses, that is, the news actor and the news
action, are derived from van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor and social action
networks. The third analysis, that is, the author evaluation, is partly adapted from
Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal system. Both van Leeuwen’s and Martin and
White’s frameworks were inspired by Halliday‘s systemic functional linguistics
(Halliday, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). According to Halliday,
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language is a social semiotic system which serves communication functions called
‘metafunctions’. There are three metafunctions: (1) ideational or representational
metafunction, which includes experiential and logical functions and functions to
construe experience and thoughts, (2) interpersonal metafunction which functions
to indicate social relationships and express opinion and attitude, and (3) textual
metafunction which functions to organize the experience and social relations into
a coherent and relevant text.
Within the social cognitive perspectives, news is seen not only as a report of
events, thus fulfilling the ideational/representational function, but also as the
reporters’ opinions about the events which they share to the readers, and so carries
out the interpersonal function. Both functions will be served in the analytical
framework of this study, because the news actor and the news action analyses
realize the ideational/representational function, and the author evaluation analysis
serves the interpersonal function. The framework will be further detailed in
Chapter Three.
The third perspective of news processes is the cultural perspective. Three concepts
of this perspective are relevant to this study. First, news is understood as a product
of a culture and thus it reflects that culture and over time it becomes the
documents of that culture (Berkowitz, 2011: xii). News archives with pictures

(and now online news with photos and video recording taken from television news
programs) become the cultural and historical artifacts of the events, activities,
fashion, values, aspirations, struggles and ideologies of a society. Changes or
developments in these cultural elements are more obvious to outsiders than
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insiders, and over a certain period of time rather than within a short period of
time. Second, the current beliefs or trends of the cultural elements in turn are
believed to be used as the tools of writing by reporters (Berkowitz, 2011: xii). As
an ‘interpretive community’ (Zelizer, 1997), reporters pick up meanings in their
culture as their effort to understand new happenings and to find a place for these
events within their society’s historical and cultural narratives. The old meanings
may be incorporated into the new meanings, and new events have to be
interpreted and may be understood partly by the old meanings (Berkowitz, 2011:
115). Readers will find it easier to connect with news accounts of a tsunami, for
example, if the articles can coherently frame this disaster report into the meaning
systems of the society or the global world. So the tsunami coverage is not only
about data of victims and damages but also its impact on life and civilization. The
third concept in the cultural perspective of news is the concept of ‘collective
memory’ (Halbwachs, 1951[1992]). Collective memory means the “socially
constructed notion that brings together individuals, located in a specific group
context, who remember a common past”. Reporters often draw on events in the
past to make sense of what is happening now. They often frame new occurrences
in comparison with similar people or events in the past to argue about the scale or
seriousness of the current events. By doing so, reporters activate the historical
cues in the readers’ memory and thus can put the new events into the perspective
of the readers. Berkowitz (2011: 301) gives an example of how the US media
often compare a presidential candidate with great American presidents such as
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
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In all, one can see that the aspects of the cultural perspective of news are similar
with those of the cognitive and social perspectives of news processes. The
difference is the domain where these processes take place – the human mind, or
the community, society, culture or even the history of human kind. At the
individual’s cognitive level, to be able to understand new stimulus each person
needs to have relevant knowledge about it, otherwise it is passed by. At the
cultural level, new events can be understood only based on the past and shared
experiences of the community which gradually and over time have shaped the
way the community understands the present. At this level, reporters belonging to
an “imagined community” of newspaper readers – borrowing Benedict
Anderson’s concept of a nation (1983, 1991, 2006) – are doing their function as
the “collective memory agents” (Meyers, 2001: 322) to reconnect the community
with the present happenings. At the individual level, his/her product of
representation indicates and is influenced by his/her knowledge, ideologies, and
belief systems. The exchanges of knowledge, beliefs and memory resulting from
the news processes, which take place in the social context relatively at the same
time, also take place from generation to generation which build up the culture of
the society. Thus, the spiralling cycle of news, knowledge, society, and culture
continues.

1.3 Political and Historical Backgrounds of Australia-Indonesia Relations
Based on the social, cognitive and cultural perspectives above, it is necessary to
observe the political and historical contexts of Australia-Indonesia relations as the
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social and cultural backdrop of this study. Despite their geographical proximity,
Indonesia and Australia are very different. Ball (1991: xv) said that they are two
‘unusual’ neighboring countries. In fact, they are very different neighbors
geographically, historically, demographically, socially, culturally (e.g., Ball,

1995). Geographically, Australia is an arid island continent with a vast land
surface; it has uninhabitated deserts in its center (Nicholson, 2011). Indonesia, on
the contrary, is an archipelago of 13,667 islands with oceans and seas, and the
land surface is only 25% of the Australian land. The soil is relatively fertile due to
the volcanic ashes from a number of volcanoes. The different geographical
conditions shape the different lifestyles of the people. Historically, their relations
started in the pre-historic era with the Aborigines in Australia believed to have
originated from the south-east Asian regions and migrated to the southern regions
50,000 to 70,000 years ago. As they migrated passing the Indonesian archipelago,
some groups were believed to have stayed in Indonesia while some others
continued their journey further down south. From the 15th century, Bugis sailors
from Indonesia and the Aborigines living in the northern coasts of Australia had
sold or exchanged goods, especially ‘teripang’ (sea cucumber), which was a
delicacy in Chinese restaurants in Australia (Blainey, 1994). Studies in history
and linguistics have also pointed out that many loan words in the local Aborigine
languages of the Northern Territory are of Bugis or Malay origin.
Socially and culturally, Australia and Indonesia are very distant minimally in four
aspects. First, demographically, according to 2008 census, Indonesia’s population
is 227.8 million ( which is more than
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ten times the Australian population, 21,664,000 people
( Indonesians are composed
mostly of indigenous peoples from around 500 tribes and a small percentage of
Chinese and other non-indigenous Indonesians. According to The World Factbook
of CIA ( />factbook/geos/id.html), 13.3% or almost thirty millions of the population live
below poverty line. Australian population today, on the other hand, is composed
of people from a great variety of origins in the world since the implementation of
Multicultural Acts in 1975. According to Australia Council of Social Service
(ACOSS), around 11% or two millions of Australians in 2006 were categorized as

living below poverty line (acoss.org.au/images/uploads/ACOSS_Poverty_
October_2011.pdf).
Second, concerning the population and culture, Indonesians, who are believed to
have originated from Yunnan, China, have developed an Asian, eastern or the
diverse traditional local cultures. For example, Javanese tradition in Central and
East Java is different from Sundanese in West Java. All of these are also different
from Bataknese in North Sumatra, Ambonese in the Mollucas, Balinese in Bali
and so are other local traditions. The present Australians, on the contrary, with a
majority of white descendants from British, Irish and other European immigrants,
have adopted a predominantly western culture. Third, concerning the people and
religion, it was estimated in 2009 that almost 90% of Indonesians are Muslims
(); in fact, Indonesia has become the biggest Muslim-
populated nation in the world. Consequently, Islam is used as the basis for the