This research was conducted to discover and compare the ideology of news texts published in The Jakarta Post and The Jakarta Globe websites after the first debate of presidential candidate during pre-election 2014. It was also executed to describe how the objectivity of the both media in serving the information to the readers.
This research is based on a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach from Halliday (1994), focusing on interpersonal meaning analysis. It employs descriptive qualitative research and uses total sampling. The realization of mood system, mood structure, transitivity, modality, and (attitudinal/ descriptive) lexis system are displayed to discover the status and affect among participants. Text structure analysis is also attached to explore its genre and ideology of both texts. Then, all the results are correlated to media theory talking about the stances and objectivity in looking newsworthiness.
There are some key findings in the thesis. First, both of news texts dominantly employ proposition clause for giving information. It indicates the status of the writer towards the readers which is close but still equal. The propositional clauses in both texts also show the judgement from the writer towards the candidates in the debate. It is proved by the use of Verbal Behvioral Process which is dominantly used in both texts. Thus, it displays the ‘affect’ of the writer of both texts who prefer Jokowi-Kalla to Prabowo-Hatta.
Second, although the stance of both texts belongs to Jokowi-Kalla, the writer of The Jakarta Globe sounds more objective by quoting some others’ opinion, using discussion genre, and being protagonist. Meanwhile, the writer of The Jakarta Post seems more subjective since the judgements are coming from one-sided point of view, with analytical exposition genre, and being antagonist.
Finally, related to media theory, the last finding shows that both media during the election is no longer obeying code ethics of journalism. The result shows that they did not publish facts only, but also opinion. The reason why they choose to be like that is for gaining newsworthiness in aim of attracting human interest.
Keywords: SFL, Interpersonal meaning, genre, ideology, news texts, media, Indonesia election.