In the critical period of the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia, the role of media in reporting information should be in the spotlight, particularly in representing the social actors involved. This research aimed to discover the social actor representation and to explain the pattern and ideologies of three Indonesian online news media during the covid-19 pandemic. This research analyzed by using social actor representation framework by Theo van Leeuwen and Halliday’s transitivity analysis and considered as a qualitative descriptive research. The data were taken from three different news text in three different Indonesian media, namely The Jakarta Post, VOI.id, and Tempo.co reporting Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. The method of data collection and analysis was domain, taxonomy, componential, and cultural context analysis proposed by Spradley.
The research findings found that the news producers employed inclusion and exclusion strategy to portray Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan in the text. The researcher found 38 data in The Jakarta Post, 12 data in VOI.id, and 8 data in Tempo.co. Backgrounding strategy is only exclusion strategy found in the data, while activation strategy is the highly used strategy of inclusion followed by specification, nomination, objectivation, collectivation, association, beneficialized, individualization, functionalization, subjected strategy. Transitivity is used by news producers as linguistic evidence to identify the processes, actors, and circumstances contained in the text, then these findings are analyzed to obtain the pattern of social actor representation. As a result, The Jakarta Post tend to focus on delivering representations of Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan by showing the roles, achievements, and reputations of social actors. Whereas, VOI.id and Tempo.co prefer to present the current situation of Covid-19 in Indonesia without leaving the image construction of Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan. They seek to construct an honest and straightforward narratives, thus demonstrating a tendency to impart information in unbiased manner. However, it is undeniable that the news that is made can rise to some implicit beliefs that can be understood by some critical readers who understand the news comprehensively.