CREATING A POPULIST POLITICAL FIGURE: AN INDONESIAN CASE
This paper, in comparison with a Western/European approach, aims to briefly explain the role of the media as a tool for creating and rising a political image in Indonesia. In the presidential election of 2014, Indonesia had two candidates. One of them named Mr. Joko Widodo also known as Jokowi. During his campaigns, he offered policies that try to respond to civil demands while his physical appearance also claimed to be a cool one by his supporters. Detik.com, as one of the electronic mediums, uses this circumstance to generate the news about Jokowi's personality positively for him to gain public sympathy. Methodologically this study uses discourse analysis and documentation as the data collecting technique. The main research platform here is detik.com, an online news site allegedly pro Jakowi. We have here taken 50 news items as the analysis unit on the period time started from 5 June to 4 July 2014. The results of this study indicate that detik.com as an Indonesian media course tries to support and represent Jokowi's political image as a populist and ideal figure who could symbolize the public interest in the Republic of Indonesia.