Determining the Ideology and Neutrality of Republika English News Online in Delivering Political News During the 2024 Presidential Election Campaign
Abstract
This study examines the ideology and neutrality of Republika English News Online in reporting political news during the 2024 Indonesian presidential election campaign. Using a qualitative descriptive design, the study applies Norman Fairclough's threedimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (text, discourse practice, and social practice) to trace ideological representation, together with a four-indicator neutrality framework covering balance, impartiality, fairness, and objectivity [CHECK: the original abstract attributes this neutrality framework to Westerstahl, but no Westerstahl citation appears in the body of the source manuscript]. Data consisted of fifteen political news articles published by Republika English News Online during the official campaign period, 28 November 2023 to 10 February 2024, collected through documentation and analyzed qualitatively. The findings show that Republika English News Online did not explicitly endorse any presidential candidate; instead, it implicitly constructed an ideology emphasizing democracy, political ethics, transparency, public welfare, and national development through lexical choices, quotation patterns, issue selection, and framing. The outlet also generally fulfilled the four neutrality indicators, distributing coverage relatively evenly across the three candidate pairs, relying on direct quotation rather than editorial commentary, and situating statements within explanatory context, even though the selection of sources, quotations, and issues still carried implicit ideological weight. The study concludes that ideological representation and journalistic neutrality are not mutually exclusive in political news reporting, and that professionally produced news inevitably involves selection processes that shape political meaning even when factual accuracy is preserved.
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