Shared question, divergent verdicts: media framing of the national-disaster threshold in Indonesia’s 2025 Sumatra floods

Abstract

Abstract

In decentralized systems, declaring a national disaster marks a contested threshold: the point at which subnational capacity is deemed exhausted and central authority must assume control. Because Indonesia's disaster law names criteria without numerical triggers, that judgment is argued in public, and news media are one place where it is argued. This study examines how three Indonesian online outlets, Detik.com, Kompas.com, and Waspada.id, framed the government's response to the 2025 Sumatra floods and the question of national-disaster status. Using qualitative framing analysis, it examines forty articles published between 27 November 2025 and 2 January 2026, coded by two authors independently against Entman's four framing functions and an additional case-specific code recording each article's stance toward the capacity threshold. All forty articles are analyzed and reported: 29 news items form the comparison across the three outlets, and the remaining 11 (six from the Kompas.com environment desk and five analysis and opinion items) are reported separately because they are not comparable across outlets. All three outlets raised the threshold question in part of their coverage, so they differed less in agenda than in verdict and remedy. Detik.com presents state conduct as capable and carries no moral censure; the other two predominantly present delay as a failure of obligation. Remedies also differ: operational measures predominate in Detik.com and a national-disaster declaration in Waspada.id, while the general news of Kompas.com is dispersed across remedies and ecological reform is concentrated in its environment desk. The study argues that outlets can share a problem agenda while offering incompatible remedies. In decentralized systems, the question of who should act is therefore contested through remedy selection more than through agenda exclusion. The analysis concerns media texts only; audience reception was not studied.