Bali’s tourism sector is facing increasingly complex pressures as mobility, tourism activity, and demand for adequate infrastructure continue to grow. Issues of damaged roads and traffic congestion are not merely transportation concerns but may also become part of destination image construction through media coverage and social media discourse. This study aims to analyze how the media construct the image of Bali tourism through coverage of damaged roads and traffic congestion and to identify differences in the representation of these issues between online media and social media. The study employs a qualitative approach using a literature review combined with Robert M. Entman’s framing analysis. The data consist of relevant scholarly literature as well as a corpus of online news reports and social media content concerning tourism infrastructure issues in Bali during the January–September 2026 period. The analysis applies four framing elements: define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgment, and treatment recommendation, followed by a comparative analysis to identify patterns of issue construction across media platforms. The findings indicate that the media construct damaged roads and traffic congestion as issues of accessibility, mobility, tourist convenience, public service quality, and destination carrying capacity. Online media tend to emphasize institutional and policy perspectives as dominant sources of narratives, whereas social media place greater emphasis on the direct experiences of local communities and tourists through visual content and personal narratives. The interaction between the two media environments contributes to issue amplification, making infrastructure conditions part of the representation of destination quality. The study concludes that the image of Bali tourism within the digital media ecosystem is dynamically constructed through the interaction between the physical conditions of destinations, user experiences, media coverage, and institutional responses. These findings highlight the importance of integrating infrastructure management, mobility governance, tourist experiences, and public communication in managing the image of Bali as a tourism destination.
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