Abstract
The diversity of journalistic language in online news media often carries ideological undertones in constructing criminal events, particularly cases involving violence and touching on humanitarian values. This study aims to describe and compare the construction of social actors in news coverage of a family murder case in Indramayu across three online media outlets, namely Kompas.com, Aktual.com, and RMOL.ID. This research employs a qualitative method with a descriptive approach and applies Theo van Leeuwen's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model, encompassing eleven strategies of exclusion (removing or obscuring actors) and inclusion (displaying or highlighting actors), including nominalization, passivation, activation, backgrounding, suppression, specification, generalization, personalization, impersonalization, aggregation, and individualization. The research data consist of lingual units in the form of clauses or sentences collected through documentation techniques and analyzed using content analysis techniques. The findings reveal that the three media outlets exhibit contrasting ideological tendencies in representing the social actors involved. Kompas.com focuses on detailed victim data and police legal transparency through dominant activation and specification strategies. Aktual.com highlights the formality of court proceedings and the validity of digital evidence through nominalization and impersonalization strategies. In contrast, RMOL.ID adopts a critical stance by spotlighting alleged procedural errors committed by the police through institutional impersonalization while employing emotional generalizations to evoke public empathy for the victims. It can be concluded that the construction of social actors in news reports is not merely a neutral reflection of reality, but is strongly determined by the perspectives and ideological agendas held by each media institution. This study also serves as an effort to enrich critical discourse studies in the domain of Indonesian-language crime journalism.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Sabila Nurul Fadlillah, Ayu Tria Eka Putri, Kholid Abdullah Harras (Author)