Three Indonesian Newsrooms, One Question, Three Verdicts on the 2025 Sumatra Floods

When Tropical Cyclone Senyar swept across northern Sumatra in late November 2025, it set off flooding and landslides across Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra that would ultimately kill at least 1,178 people and affect more than 3.3 million residents across 50 districts, according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency. But beyond the physical devastation, the disaster ignited a fierce six-week public argument over a deceptively technical question: should the government declare a national disaster? A new study published in Frontiers in Communication examines how three Indonesian online news outlets answered that question, and its findings reveal something unexpected about how media power actually operates in a decentralized democracy.

The research, conducted by Rudianto Rudianto, Yan Hendra, and Ribut Priadi of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sumatera Utara, analyzed forty articles published between 27 November 2025 and 2 January 2026 by Detik.com, Kompas.com, and Waspada.id. Using qualitative framing analysis grounded in Robert Entman’s influential four-function model, the team coded each article for how it defined the problem, diagnosed its causes, morally evaluated government conduct, and recommended remedies. Two authors coded the full corpus independently, achieving Cohen’s kappa values between 0.75 and 0.91 across the five coding categories, with a mean of 0.86, figures conventionally described as substantial to almost perfect agreement.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is the additional case-specific code the researchers layered on top of Entman’s framework. Each article was classified by its stance toward what the researchers call the capacity threshold: the point at which subnational government capacity is deemed exhausted and central authority must assume control. Articles could either not raise the question, report it as disputed, or proceed from the premise that regional capacity had already been exhausted. This distinction matters because Indonesian disaster law, Law No. 24/2007, lists criteria for disaster status, including casualties, damage, affected area, and socio-economic impact, but assigns no numerical trigger. The judgment of whether regional capacity has failed is therefore left to executive discretion, and it is argued in public rather than settled by measurement.

The three outlets were selected purposively for their differences in reach, format, and proximity to the disaster. Detik.com is a national portal among the most visited in Indonesia, part of the Trans Media group, built on speed and short, frequently updated items with a register close to official sources. Kompas.com, the online outlet of the Kompas Gramedia group, inherits a tradition of longer, source-rich reporting and runs a dedicated environment desk called Lestari. Waspada.id is the online edition of a Medan daily founded in 1947, circulating in North Sumatra and Aceh, drawing heavily on regional officials and local organizations, placing it closest to the affected areas.

The study’s most striking finding is what did not happen. Framing theory and prior Indonesian flood scholarship would lead one to expect that a national outlet oriented toward government performance might simply exclude the question of whether the state had been overwhelmed. The corpus does not bear this out. All three outlets engaged the capacity-threshold question in part of their coverage. Four of nine Detik.com items and three of seven Kompas.com news items raised the threshold question, and one Detik.com item even proceeded from the premise that subnational capacity had already been exhausted. Waspada.id raised it in twelve of thirteen news items. The national outlet standing closest to the government’s operational account did not keep the constitutional question off its pages.

Where the outlets converged on agenda, however, they divided sharply on moral evaluation. Detik.com rendered state conduct as responsive and capable in six of its nine items, and in none did it frame conduct as a moral or legitimacy failure. Its coverage centered on the operational dimension: public kitchens expanding from twenty-eight to thirty-nine, presidential field visits, the repair of Bailey bridges connecting Bireuen and Takengon, and continued search-and-rescue operations by Basarnas. The Ministry of Social Affairs was reported as having set up twenty-eight public kitchens serving 50,000 flood victims within days of the disaster. The recommended remedies were consistently short-term and technocratic: expand logistics, continue search and rescue, accelerate infrastructure repair.

Kompas.com and Waspada.id inverted this pattern almost exactly. Kompas.com framed delay or inadequacy as a failure of obligation in five of seven news items, grounding its verdict in expert and civil-society testimony, including a Universitas Brawijaya conservation scientist’s assessment that the flood mirrors a crisis in landscape governance. Waspada.id, the most critical outlet in the corpus, rendered delay as a moral and legitimacy failure in nine of thirteen news items. Its coverage documented the regent of South Aceh publicly stating, under the headline metaphor of raising the white flag, that his administration could not independently manage the district’s flood response and formally requesting that the provincial government assume control. The outlet’s sharpest article reported that twenty days into the response, residents of Central Aceh, Gayo Lues, and Bener Meriah remained without adequate food, quoting the charge that the president said the state is capable of handling this on its own, but people were still being left hungry.

The remedies diverged in ways that reveal fundamentally different theories of what went wrong. Detik.com concentrated on operational measures in five of nine items, implying that the response mechanism is sound and requires resourcing. Waspada.id’s characteristic remedy was the national-disaster declaration itself, predominating in seven of thirteen news items, implying that the mechanism is sound but wrongly triggered, that the failure lies in the withholding of an authority transfer the statute provides for. The general news of Kompas.com showed no predominant remedy, dispersing across central intervention, status review, operational relief, ecological reform, preparedness, and needs-based assistance. Ecological and spatial-planning reform was concentrated in Kompas.com’s Lestari desk, where four of six items recommended it, implying that the disaster was generated upstream by land-use governance and that no improvement in emergency response would have prevented it.

A further finding concerns the internal structure of criticism where it appeared. The sharpest attack on government performance in the corpus attributed the failures not to the president but to inaccurate reporting reaching him from subordinates and to weak execution within his cabinet. The president was positioned as deceived rather than responsible. This pattern, consistent with prior observations of Indonesian disaster reporting, qualifies the finding of regional-outlet criticality: Waspada.id demanded that the center intervene more forcefully but did not question the authority of the center to do so. Criticism of central performance and affirmation of central authority proved entirely compatible.

The study’s theoretical contribution is subtle but consequential. Entman’s model separates problem definition from treatment recommendation without specifying how tightly the two are coupled. The Sumatra case suggests they can come apart: outlets may agree on what is at issue and still recommend remedies aimed at different institutions. In a decentralized system where the transfer of authority is discretionary, the choice of remedy is where the question of who should act is actually argued. The researchers note that the argument for changing how authority passes from region to center was carried chiefly by an outlet serving the affected provinces, while the national outlets presented the disaster mainly as a matter of logistics or, in the environment desk of Kompas.com, of forest and land-use governance. Each is a reasonable account of what should change, but they are directed at different institutions: the relief apparatus, the agencies that regulate land use, and the executive that decides disaster status. A policy debate informed by only one of them would overlook the others. The authors caution that their analysis concerns media texts only; whether readers of these outlets formed different expectations of government is a question for reception research, which this study did not undertake.

Subject of Research: Media framing of the national-disaster threshold in Indonesia's 2025 Sumatra floods

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

Article References: Rudianto, R., Hendra, Y., & Priadi, R. (2026). Shared question, divergent verdicts: media framing of the national-disaster threshold in Indonesia’s 2025 Sumatra floods. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1988712. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1988712

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1988712

Keywords: media framing, Indonesia, Sumatra floods, disaster communication, national disaster declaration, Entman framing, decentralization, state capacity, Detik.com, Kompas.com, Waspada.id, disaster governance