Media and Politics in Indonesia: The Alignments of the Media in the 2019 Elections

This study aims to determine the framing of the news in the Kompas and the Republika newspapers on the debates of the presidential and vicepresidential candidates in the 2019 elections in the Republic of Indonesia. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method comprising the framing analysis developed by Zongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicki which suggests four analytical tools, namely Syntactic, Script, Thematic and Rhetorical structures. The results showed that the Kompas newspaper reported the presidential and vice-presidential debates in a balanced and neutral manner, because the owners of this media were not affiliated with any political interests in the 2019 presidential elections. The Republika newspaper constructed the news of the presidential and vicepresidential debates by giving coverage to news in favour of the presidential election of Jokowi and Ma'ruf Amin. This is influenced by media ownership factors, as its owner, Erick Thohir is a chairman of the National Winning Team (TKN) for Jokowi and Ma'ruf Amin.