ABSTRACT

Sulaiman, Campaign Issues in the Central Sulawesi Governor Election: A Discourse Analysis on the “Radar” Daily Newspaper Coverage (supervised by Armin Arsyad and Eddy Soejono).

This research is a study on the campaign issues in the Central Sulawesi governor election for the 2006-2011 term. To investigate these issues, a qualitative-descriptive method has been used to analyze the frequency, themes and the news structure of the campaign of all pairs of candidates appeared in the main daily newspaper in the province, “Radar”. 

The model of analysis is referred to a method of analysis derived by Van Dijk [.......(isi tahunnya)] based on the theory of agenda setting, especially media agenda.  The news text analysis and social cognition have been combined in a couple of in-depth interviews with key informants. The text and theme analysis is focused on the news covering the campaign issues, including the issues on the campaign format, the personality of all candidates and their track records, their vision, mission and programs, and the issues of supports from political parties.   

The results have shown that the frequency of media coverage did not affect the voters. The candidates pair of Prof. (Em) Drs. H. Aminuddin Ponulele, M.Si – Drs. H. Sahabuddin M., M.Si  (or the AS candidates) has been covered in the news for 11 times or 40.7% to get only 25.40% of votes, while the pair of H. B. Paliudju – H. Ahmad Yahya, SE, MM (or the BA candidates) has only been covered 5 times (or 18.5%) in the media to win the election with 36.15% of votes. Other factors, such as the campaign format, the personality of all candidates and their track records, their vision, mission and programs, and the issues of supports from political parties, have a tendency to be more significantly influential to the voters’ choice. The reliability of the data is measured as 0.85 in pi-index.  The news structure has indicated imbalance coverage by the daily newspaper, therefore it was not objective. The reporters did not strictly follow the principle of “cover-both-sides”. Most coverage was on the issues of violence (dysphemisms), show of forces by one pair of candidates, rather than the values of peacefulness (euphemisms).