The Representation of Social Actors in Mosques Shooting in New Zealand News Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis

A few weeks ago our world was shocked by the shooting of two mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. The worlds then condemned the action. Media all over the world blew the incident up in their reports, news, dan opinions. Some techniques to build such discourse concerning the given context are used to make point of views. This research will be focused on how these two online media, New Zealand Herald of New Zealand and detikcom of Indonesia, represent some social actors in their news discourse. The research aims to describe how some social actors are represented and their interpretation in the discourse based on van Leuween’s. The discourses chosen will be two articles with the same and specific theme, the live streaming of the action. The discourses are then broken down into smaller units. Social actors hereby are broken down into four categories: the shooter, the victims, the government, and the other parties. Based on the preliminary analysis, some factors are considered to decide which techniques are used to represents social actors involved, i.e. ideology and the background of the media. The government involved is relatively have the same representation, i.e. determination instead of indetermination. Meanwhile, in representing the main actor, the shooter, detikcom uses nomination technique by attaching a certain generic word, i.e. pelaku ‘doer’. New Zealand Herald, at the same time, uses categorization by attaching a more accurate word, gunman.