<![CDATA[The Citarum River was selected because its severe material degradation has been condensed in public discourse into the durable label “the world’s dirtiest river,” while the Citarum Harum programme seeks to replace that image with a narrative of restoration. The central problem is therefore not only pollution but also the ideological consequences of repeated media labelling: a temporary ecological condition can become a stable public identity that continues to circulate after material conditions begin to improve. This study examines how Indonesian online media construct ecological awareness through semantic choices that represent the Citarum from pollution to restoration. It uses a qualitative semantic-discursive design supported by descriptive frequency counts. The corpus consists of 50 unique Indonesian online-media articles published between 2018 and 2024. Predicative, evaluative, and metalinguistic units were collected, cleaned, and coded into seven categories: ecological condition attribution, sensory intensification, evaluative classification, metalinguistic labelling, identity stabilization, identity repair or delabelling, and counter-identity construction. Thirty-one units met the analytical criteria. The findings show a trajectory in which descriptions of waste, contamination, color, foam, and odor are intensified into scalar judgments, converted into public labels, and discursively stabilized through repetition and historical recall. Restoration discourse then builds ecological awareness through temporal distancing, explicit delabelling, measurable evidence of recovery, and positive target attributes such as clean, swimmable, potable, and paripurna ‘fully restored/ideal’. The study proposes ecological identity repair to explain how media discourse renegotiates a non-human entity’s discursively stabilized public identity. It concludes that restoration communication must address both material recovery and the discursive memory created by earlier media labels.]]>
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