THE CONSTRUCTION OF INDONESIAN MUSLIMS AND ISLAM IN AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPERS: A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the discursive representation of Indonesian Muslims in the Australian press by employing a methodological synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. It analyses two different corpora of Australian newspapers from two different periods (2002-2006 and 2012-2016). Keyword and collocation analyses were used to reveal recurrent patterns or dominant discourses of Indonesian Muslims. Concordances were then investigated to analyse the data more qualitatively. The findings suggest that dominant discourses around Indonesian Muslims in the Australian newspapers are related to terrorism and extremism and they have not undergone a dramatic shift over the last 15 years. It then can be argued that the media representations of Muslims in Indonesia, a country that is not involved in major conflict and wars, are still primarily negative. While the Australian newspapers canonically portray Indonesian Muslims as moderate, the frequencies for moderate belief words are lower than strong belief words and the term is mainly used in the discussion of terrorism and extremism. Also, a qualitative analysis of the term moderate suggests that in few cases it carries implications that being tolerant of other religions is not a default character of a majority-Muslim country.