Infrastructure discourse in Indonesian media: An ecolinguistic perspective

Infrastructure development marks a country’s progress and growth. However, there are concerns regarding the potential environmental threats posed by extensive infrastructure development, including issues such as biodiversity loss, reduction in food supply, and ecosystem imbalances. Specifically, by taking the example of Jogja-Solo toll roads (JSTR) in Indonesian mass media, this article addresses exclusion and inclusion strategies of environmental impacts in an infrastructure discourse. Using AntConc 4.2.0, we examined the 410 news media articles, collected from December 2019 to June 2023, and investigated the representation of social actors based on van Leeuwen’s socio-semantics framework. The analysis showed that Indonesian mass media constructed the institutionalisation of infrastructure discourse through inclusion and nomination strategies identified from proper names and their position titles in the company. The JSTR project is also narrated as a national strategic agenda to benefit the country’s economic growth by categorising the government and construction companies into one group. On the other hand, the exclusion of environmental impacts in the JSTR is identified from the categorisation strategies shown by the lexemes ‘land’ and ‘resident’ and their juxtaposition with collocates of ‘monetary compensation’. This paper concludes that the repetition and rewording of particular lexico-grammatical choices and social actors are used by news media to construct infrastructure discourse merely from the anthropocentric interest. © 2024, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Faculty of Journalism. All rights reserved.