Linguistic Inquiries of Unjust Sentence of Victim’s Rape: A Defense from Media

Abstract

This article discusses the media's perspective related to incest rape case in Jambi written by the editorial board and posted in The Jakarta Post's opinion column. The aim of this paper is finding out the media's evaluation toward the case using an appraisal system. The analysis is done by classifying which utterance in the data that consists of several arguments and opinions. Later on, the researchers highlight and discuss expressions which represent the media's evaluation of the government, the family member of the victim, and the whole society and state relating to the case. The result of the analysis presents that the media put their negative evaluation toward the hearing decision and sentence addressed to the victim, especially negative evaluation of judgment and appreciation. Those negative evaluations are deemed as a form of defense from media instead of a neutral commentary.