Flood, State, And Ideology: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Tempo Media's Coverage of The Prabowo Administration's Disaster Management Policy In Sumatra

Abstract

Floods that struck multiple regions of Sumatra in late 2025 generated not only a humanitarian crisis but also a discursive arena involving the state, mass media, and civil society. This study examines how Tempo, Indonesia's prominent critical news magazine, framed the Prabowo administration's disaster management policies and investigates the ideological formations embedded in these discursive productions. Employing a qualitative approach grounded in Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework, this research analyzes four Tempo news articles published between November and December 2025, focusing on textual analysis, discursive practice, and social practice. The findings reveal that Tempo predominantly represents the state as a responsive, capable, and morally accountable actor through narratives of rapid military mobilization, presidential empathy, and policy legitimacy. However, this dominant discourse exhibits a significant gap between official claims and the lived experiences of flood victims, particularly regarding unequal aid distribution and structural deficiencies in disaster response. The study confirms that disaster coverage in media discourse transcends natural event reporting; rather, disasters function as political arenas in which language serves to maintain, negotiate, and occasionally challenge state power and legitimacy. This analysis contributes to a broader understanding of the interplay between disaster journalism, political power, and ideological reproduction in post-authoritarian Southeast Asian democracies.

Keywords: flood disaster; state representation; ideology; critical discourse analysis;