Media Framing on Covid-19 Pandemic in Malaysian and Indonesian Newspapers

Abstract

The Corona or Covid-19 outbreak has been much more prominent in media coverage than other recent epidemics. Media often adopt the frames in covering news and dealing with sources. This study aims to find out which frames are dominant during Covid-19 pandemic coverage from January 25 to June 10, 2020 in Indonesian and Malaysian newspapers. Two leading newspapers were selected as samples: Berita Harian represents reporting from Malaysia and Kompas represents reporting from Indonesia. This study uses a deductive analysis approach that involves predefining certain frames (alarming, reassuring, or neutral) as content analytic unit to confirm the degree to which these frames appear in the news. This study concludes that Berita Harian reported the Covid-19 pandemic with all the three frames (alarming, reassuring, and neutral) where a neutral frame is the most dominant (39.3%) followed by alarming (32.10%) and reassuring (28.60%). Meanwhile, the framing of Kompas' reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic was dominated by an alarming tone (83.30%) and neutral (16.70%) while the reassuring tone was absent from the newspaper. This study found that militaristic language was largely absent both in Berita Harian and Kompas. The occasional metaphor used to describe the Covid-19 pandemic is ‘dangerous disease’. TS - CrossRef