<![CDATA[This study attempts to explore the tendency of the regional newspaper SU ARA MERDEKA in reporting the issue of religion and violence during 1998. Religion and violence became the topical issue in the first year of the era of 'reformasi' since several riots, killing, and social unrest occurred and religion often becomes a triggered factor. Changing of power from the authoritarianism to the reformation era has a significant contribution to the religious tension in Indonesia. People are able to express their opinion without any prior restrains in one hand. on the other hand the upholding the law in Indonesia is still questionable. The aim of this study is to provide data the extent that the regional newspaper SUARA MERDEKA pub• lished and reported the issue of religion and violence in 1998. This research employs two contemporary methodological approaches on media studies, content analysis and discourse analysis. Content analysis is utilized for calculating the news appearance on religion and violence, while discourse analysis emphasizes on the social and political context where and when the text was made. The basic framework guiding the inquiry in this study is by using six categories that is divided into two topics: violence and news reporting. Violence topic consists of three categories: type of violence, genre of violence and causes of violence. While the news reporting topic consists of three categories as well: news site, news resources and news tones /method of reporting. The research finds that the total numbers of reporting on religion and violence topic were 128 issues. In terms of violence topic, physical violence dominated the type of violence in 1998, while non-physical violence only had small portion of appearance. Then, most religion conflicts that happened in the first year of reformasi were caused by conflict among religion adherent. Uncertainty of upholding law was the main cause of the tension of religion. Although in 1998 the press had got its freedom and greater transparency in reporting, this study found that the majority of SU ARA MERDEKA reporting tended to take official speeches as the resource of news report. ln respect to news tones, the informative method was considered . as the best option in presenting violence issues.]]>
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