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

1 Introduction

How news media frame a government's handling of floods shapes the terms on which that handling is judged (Adekola and Lamond, 2018; Escobar and Demeritt, 2014). Frames define what the problem is, what caused it, how the conduct of those responsible should be evaluated, and what ought to be done (Entman, 1993). In Indonesia, studies of flood coverage have repeatedly found outlets dividing along these lines. Coverage of the 2020 Jakarta floods ranged from accounts of local-government failure to favorable portrayals of evacuation and aid (Pinontoan and Wahid, 2020; Wardyaningrum, 2022), and coverage of the 2021 South Kalimantan floods framed the disaster as a failure of prevention (Fabriar et al., 2023). This literature also notes a tendency toward episodic reporting of impacts and personal stories, with less attention to structural drivers such as deforestation (Murti et al., 2023).

The floods that struck northern Sumatra in late November 2025 offer a demanding case for this line of research. Triggered by Tropical Cyclone Senyar and affecting Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra (Alberti et al., 2025; Fiantis et al., 2025), the disaster had by 6 January 2026 caused at least 1,178 deaths and affected more than 3.3 million people across 50 districts, according to the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB). Central and regional agencies mounted search and rescue, evacuation, and relief operations, and the president visited affected areas several times. Research on media coverage of this disaster has begun to appear. A framing study of 56 articles from national online outlets in the first ten days of December 2025 found that coverage mostly attributed the floods to extreme weather and presented government actors chiefly as responders (Oktavian et al., 2026). That study covers national outlets over a short period and concentrates on causes and responsibility. It does not include a regional outlet from the affected provinces, and it does not examine the dispute over national-disaster status, which ran for some six weeks and is the focus here.

What distinguishes the case is the polemic that accompanied the response. For roughly six weeks, officials, regional heads, national and regional legislators, academic experts, and civil-society organizations argued in the press over whether the government should declare a national disaster. The argument had several strands. One concerned capacity: whether the scale of the disaster had exceeded what provincial and district governments could manage, as several district heads in Aceh publicly stated. A second concerned causes, with experts and environmental organizations attributing the severity of the damage to deforestation, mining, and plantation expansion. A third concerned the oversight of emergency spending, and it was raised on both sides. Opponents of a declaration warned that emergency status could open room for corruption because budget controls are weaker in an emergency (Netralnews, 2025), while an anti-corruption coalition called for national status together with full disclosure of disaster budgets and procurement (Indonesia Corruption Watch, 2025). When this article refers to public debate, it means this exchange among identifiable actors as reported in the news media. It does not refer to opinion among citizens, which the study did not observe.

The legal setting explains why the debate could not be settled by facts alone. Law No. 24/2007 lists criteria for disaster status, namely casualties, damage, affected area, and socio-economic impact, but assigns no numerical trigger, which leaves the judgment to executive discretion (Dadek et al., 2021). In the 2025 case the central government did not declare national status, stating that its priority was to speed up the response and give full central support to the regions (Sekretariat Negara, 2025). By mid-December the president reported that more than 50,000 military and police personnel had been deployed, along with more than 60 helicopters and about 1,000 units of heavy equipment (Detik.com, 2025). The question in the press was therefore never whether the center acted but by what standard its action, and the regions’ capacity, should be judged.

Existing framing studies of Indonesian disasters have mostly asked whether media portray the government's response favorably or critically. They have not examined how media handle this prior question of the standard of adequacy, and specifically the threshold at which responsibility is expected to pass from regional to central government. Framing analysis is suited to that question because it identifies the definitions, evaluations, and remedies that media texts offer. It does not measure how audiences understand them, and this study makes no claim about reception.

The study therefore asks three questions. First, how did Detik.com, Kompas.com, and Waspada.id frame the government's emergency response across Entman's four functions? Second, what stance did each outlet's coverage take toward the question of whether subnational capacity had been exceeded? Third, what remedies did each outlet present, and what do the differences imply for the range of reform arguments available in Indonesian online news?

2 Theoretical framework

2.1 News as construction and Entman’s framing functions

From a media studies perspective, news is understood as a socially constructed product rather than a neutral reflection of reality (Entman, 1993; Suroko et al., 2019). Media organizations select certain facts, prioritize specific sources, and apply narrative structures that reflect editorial values, institutional interests, and broader socio-political contexts, thereby constructing social reality through selection, emphasis, and framing (Entman, 1993; Rosilawati and Fadilla, 2021). Framing theory is commonly used to analyze this process, focusing on how media define problems, attribute causes, make moral evaluations, and propose solutions (Doudaki et al., 2016; Entman, 1993).

Entman's framing model, one of the most influential paradigms in communication research, holds that frames select and make salient certain aspects of reality in order to promote a particular interpretation, causal explanation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation (Entman, 1993; Fabriar et al., 2023). The model specifies four functions—problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation—that together make up the interpretation a text offers (Asteria, 2016).

2.2 Disaster framing in Indonesian media

In Indonesian contexts, this model has been applied to flood coverage, where outlets such as Tempo.co framed the South Kalimantan floods as governmental failure arising from inadequate prevention, emphasizing negative aspects of the official response through selective attention to policy gaps and public suffering (Fabriar et al., 2023). Similar patterns appear in coverage of the Jakarta floods of 2020, where Kompas.com framed the event as a failure of local-government preparedness and demanded accountability in moral and ethical terms, while Jawapos.com portrayed government efforts more favorably, highlighting achievements in evacuation and aid (Pinontoan and Wahid, 2020; Wardyaningrum, 2022). Closer to the present case, a framing analysis of TikTok content on the Aceh Tamiang floods of November and December 2025—the same disaster examined here, on a platform outside editorial control—found official clarifications emphasizing stability, perception management, and institutional legitimacy, while citizen-generated content foregrounded humanitarian crisis, uneven handling, and delayed response (Agustina et al., 2026). That a comparable divergence appears across platforms with quite different gatekeeping arrangements suggests the pattern is not an artifact of newsroom convention alone.

In disaster contexts, media framing plays a particularly influential role because of heightened uncertainty, emotional intensity, and public dependence on information (Haddow and Haddow, 2014). Haddow and Haddow underscore that communication is central to the success of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, with accurate information reducing risk and saving lives amid an evolving media landscape that includes social media and first informers (Haddow and Haddow, 2014). Media can frame floods as unavoidable natural events, as consequences of environmental mismanagement such as deforestation, or as indicators of government failure or success in coordination and mitigation (Adekola and Lamond, 2018; Asteria, 2016). Comparable divisions have been documented in flood coverage elsewhere: shifts between protection and risk-management frames in British and Irish broadsheets (Devitt and O’Neill, 2017; Escobar and Demeritt, 2014) and contests over blame in Australian coverage of the Queensland floods (Ewart and McLean, 2015).

Prior disaster-communication research suggests that coverage often emphasizes dramatic impacts, human suffering, and episodic heroism, while structural causes and long-term mitigation receive comparatively less attention, perpetuating cycles of vulnerability (Irawanto, 2018; Murti et al., 2023; Tierney et al., 2006). The prominence of official sources may further reinforce top-down narratives, marginalizing community perspectives, local knowledge, and calls for decentralized governance (Gelgel, 2020; Rizal et al., 2025). In Indonesia this dynamic is evident in post-tsunami reporting, where elite voices from Jakarta overshadowed survivor narratives and local rebuilding efforts, and in coverage of land fires in South Sumatra, where frames highlighted government mitigation and corporate culpability while underplaying community initiatives (Irawanto, 2018; Murti et al., 2023). Complementary theories such as agenda-setting and priming further explain how repeated emphasis on certain disaster elements, such as governmental delays, influences public priorities, policy salience, and evaluations of leaders (Apriliyanti et al., 2022; Guenther et al., 2024). Agenda-setting determines which issues gain prominence, while priming activates specific criteria for judgment, as seen in United States studies where news floods boost relief funding, in contrast to news droughts during elections, a pattern echoed in Indonesia, where competing news cycles can dilute flood coverage (Bright and Bagley, 2017; Eisensee and Strömberg, 2007). Taken together, these patterns matter for disaster governance in flood-prone regions such as Sumatra, where early warnings were issued but political follow-through lagged, and they underline the value of frames that make room for local knowledge and long-term resilience alongside emergency performance (Asteria, 2016; Griffin and Barney, 2021; Rizal et al., 2025).

2.3 Disaster governance and the threshold of state capacity for disaster management

In Indonesia, disaster management is governed by Law No. 24/2007, which structures handling across pre-disaster, emergency response, and post-disaster phases as a shared responsibility of central and regional governments (Dadek et al., 2021; Lestari et al., 2020). BNPB leads at the national level, coordinating policy, mobilization, and emergency response, while Regional Disaster Management Agencies (BPBD) operate at provincial and district or city levels, led ex officio by regional secretaries to ensure coordination (Amrullah, 2023; Hidayat et al., 2018; Lestari et al., 2020). Disaster status—national, provincial, or district and city—is declared on the basis of criteria such as the number of victims, property losses, infrastructure damage, affected area, and socio-economic impact, enabling scaled resource allocation and funding from state or regional budgets (Dadek et al., 2021; Lestari et al., 2020; Putra and Matsuyuki, 2019).

The literature reviewed above shows that media frame disasters and that Indonesian outlets do so differently at national and regional levels. It has not addressed a question that arises specifically in decentralized systems: the point at which subnational capacity for disaster management is judged to be exhausted. Indonesian disaster law places first responsibility with regional government and provides for national-disaster status, under which the central government assumes command (Dadek et al., 2021; Lestari et al., 2020). This does not mean the center is absent without a declaration. In the 2025 Sumatra floods the central government deployed personnel, logistics, and equipment at scale while declining to declare national status (Detik.com, 2025; Sekretariat Negara, 2025). Studies of Indonesian decentralization nonetheless document a recurring mismatch: regional agencies hold formal authority that many lack the fiscal and logistical means to exercise (Amrullah, 2023; Fikri et al., 2025; Putra and Matsuyuki, 2019), and Darmastuti (2020) treats this as an institutional problem of contested authority as well as one of resources.

Because the statute lists criteria without thresholds, deciding that capacity has been exceeded requires judgment, and that judgment is argued through claims and counter-claims about what each level of government can still manage. News coverage is one place where those claims are selected, weighed, and joined to proposed remedies. Entman’s (1993) account of framing as selection and salience points to two separate things a text can do with such a question: admit it to the agenda or leave it out, and, once admitted, attach a verdict and a remedy to it. Prior Indonesian flood studies have emphasized the first, documenting how national outlets give little room to structural and critical themes (Murti et al., 2023; Wardyaningrum, 2022). This study examines both.

To do so, each article is coded on Entman's four functions and, in addition, on one case-specific code recording its stance toward the capacity threshold. This code is an analytic aid for the present case. It is not proposed as an extension of Entman's model, which retains its four functions. Three stances are distinguished: the question is not raised; it is raised and reported as disputed; or the article proceeds on the premise that regional capacity has already been exhausted.

3 Materials and methods

3.1 Design and orientation

This study employs qualitative framing analysis to examine how Indonesian mass media framed the government's response to the large-scale hydrometeorological disaster—flooding and landslides triggered by Tropical Cyclone Senyar—that struck northern Sumatra beginning in late November 2025. The approach is interpretive and constructionist in orientation: news is treated not as a record of events but as a construction of them, and frames are understood as readings produced through engagement with texts rather than as properties waiting in the texts to be found. Qualitative framing analysis is well suited to exploring interpretive patterns, meanings, and representations within news texts, prioritizing depth of understanding over quantification of coverage or causal inference (Linström and Marais, 2012). News media are conceptualized here as active constructors of public discourse concerning disaster management, achieved through selective framing, narrative emphasis, and strategic sourcing (Asteria, 2016; Entman, 1993).

Entman's model was chosen over the alternatives for a reason tied to the research questions. Pan and Kosicki’s (1993) approach analyzes the syntactic, script, thematic, and rhetorical structures of individual texts, and Gamson and Modigliani’s (1989) approach traces interpretive packages across long periods of public discourse. Neither isolates the recommended remedy as a separate function. Entman's model does, and the study's second and third questions depend on separating what an outlet treats as the problem from what it presents as the solution. Computational framing methods are well suited to large corpora and to mapping many actors’ frames at once. With forty articles, and with a question that turns on the evaluative wording of each text, manual interpretive coding was judged the more appropriate instrument. Actor-level and computational analysis of the wider debate is identified as future work in Section 6.

Reading systematically does not require abandoning this orientation. Entman’s (1993) formulation was itself offered as a means of bringing coherence to a fractured paradigm, and it locates frames in observable features of texts—the presence or absence of particular keywords, stock phrases, sources, and sentences—precisely so that competing readings can be examined against the material rather than merely asserted. The category scheme described below follows that logic. Counts of how readings distribute across the corpus are reported where they clarify a pattern, but they function as descriptions of the reading rather than as measurements of the texts, and no inferential claim is built upon them.

3.2 Case and outlet selection

The unit of analysis is the individual article, and the frame coded is the outlet's presentation, which may draw on several sources within one article. Three online outlets were selected purposively because they differ in reach, format, and proximity to the disaster.

Detik.com is a national portal, among the most visited in Indonesia (Prihantoro et al., 2019; Woda et al., 2021) and part of the Trans Media group of CT Corp (Tapsell, 2017). Its journalism is built on speed: short, frequently updated items that report an event or a statement with little elaboration. Earlier work on its coverage of government-related issues describes a register close to official sources (Maududi et al., 2025).

Kompas.com is the online outlet of the Kompas Gramedia group and inherits the editorial tradition of the Kompas daily, which favors longer, source-rich reporting with attention to human and social dimensions (Tapsell, 2017; Wahyuni, 2017). It also runs thematic desks, among them Lestari, which covers environment and sustainability.

Waspada.id is the online edition of Waspada, a Medan daily founded in 1947 (Özay and Agustono, 2023) and circulating in North Sumatra and Aceh (Aulia and Alfikri, 2022). Its reporting draws heavily on regional officials, legislators, and local organizations, which places it closest to the affected areas.

These differences are expected to bear on the findings: a speed-driven national portal, a national outlet with an analytical tradition, and a regional outlet within the disaster zone are unlikely to treat the capacity question in the same way.

3.3 Search and sampling strategy

Articles were compiled through targeted searches combining Indonesian-language disaster keywords (banjir Sumatera, bencana nasional, status bencana, deforestasi Sumatera, dapur umum, jembatan bailey, BPBD, tanggap darurat) with each outlet's name, supplemented by each outlet's disaster-tag or category index pages. The search window spans 27 November 2025, shortly after Cyclone Senyar made landfall, through 2 January 2026, the date of the most recent article in the final corpus addressing the government's public explanation of its national-disaster-status decision. This window is slightly longer than the late November to December 2025 period initially anticipated, because several of the articles most substantively relevant to the central research question—the contested decision not to declare a national disaster—were published in the first days of January 2026. The same procedure was applied to all three outlets, and the search was not restricted to any desk or channel.

3.4 Inclusion and exclusion criteria

An article was included if it reported a government action, policy statement, or evaluative commentary bearing on the emergency response, whether from central or regional government. Articles were excluded if they consisted solely of routine casualty-count updates carrying no framing content beyond statistics, or if they reported community and civil-society donation activity with no government-response dimension; such content does not engage Entman's four framing functions in a way that can be meaningfully coded. Three item types are distinguished. A news item reports events or statements and attributes evaluation to named sources. An analysis or explainer is written by the newsroom and organizes reporting around a question. An opinion piece presents the argument of a named author. News items form the main corpus for comparison across outlets. Analysis and opinion items were retained because outlets also take positions through them, but they are identified in Supplementary Table S1, reported separately in the tables, and not pooled with news items in any count.

3.5 Final corpus

Applying these criteria yielded a final corpus of 40 articles: 9 from Detik.com, 17 from Kompas.com, and 14 from Waspada.id. The full list of analyzed articles, with publication dates and source URLs, is provided in Supplementary Table S1, and articles are cited below by their corpus code. Six of the Kompas.com articles were published by Lestari, the outlet's environment and sustainability desk. Detik.com and Waspada.id have no comparable desk, so these six articles, together with the five analysis and opinion items, are excluded from the comparison across outlets and reported separately in Section 4.8. The comparison therefore rests on 29 news items: 9 from Detik.com, 7 from Kompas.com, and 13 from Waspada.id. Because the numbers are small and unequal, results are given as counts within each outlet and are not compared as percentages, and claims about Detik.com and Kompas.com in particular are made with caution. All quotations from the corpus are the authors’ translations from Indonesian; each is attributed to its source article by corpus code, and the original Indonesian headline and source URL of every article are given in Supplementary Table S1.

3.6 Coding procedure

For each article, the headline, lead paragraph, and the paragraph or paragraphs addressing government cause, action, or evaluation were extracted and coded against Entman’s (1993) four framing functions: problem definition, causal diagnosis, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Multiple verification passes were conducted after initial coding to check the internal consistency of category assignment across the corpus and against direct quotations drawn from each article.

Each article was also given one additional case-specific code for its stance toward the capacity threshold: not raised (AK0), where the national-disaster-status issue and the question of whether subnational capacity had been exceeded were absent; reported as disputed (AK1), where the question was raised with competing claims reported; or treated as settled (AK2), where the article proceeded from the premise that subnational capacity had been exhausted. Operational definitions for all categories are given in Supplementary Table S2.

On each function an article received one category, the dominant one. The dominant category is the one carried by the headline and lead. Where these did not settle the matter, the category given most space in the coded paragraphs was chosen. An article can therefore carry several frames across functions; the rule only requires one category within each function.

3.7 Transparency of the interpretive procedure

Framing analysis in the Entman tradition is interpretive: frames are not properties residing in texts awaiting detection, but readings produced through engagement with them. The procedure described here does not claim otherwise. What it seeks is auditability, so that the categories guiding the reading are explicit enough, and stable enough, that a second reader working from the same scheme can follow how the reading was arrived at and can locate the points at which a different reading was available.

To that end, the second author independently applied the same category scheme to the full corpus, working from the codebook and the article texts without sight of the primary reading. The two readings converged on the substantial majority of articles across the four functions and the threshold code. Divergence clustered in causal diagnosis, which carried the largest category set and required the finest discrimination: eight of the forty articles were read differently on that function, against three on each of the other four. The recurring difficulty lay in articles that name more than one cause at comparable weight—a slow central response alongside constrained regional resources, or ecological degradation alongside severed terrain and access—where the dominant-category rule forces a choice the text does not clearly make. Every point of divergence was then examined jointly by the two coding authors and reconciled through discussion, with the reconciled reading informing the analysis below.

For readers who work with agreement coefficients, Cohen's kappa computed between the two independent readings, prior to reconciliation, was 0.89 for problem definition, 0.75 for causal diagnosis, 0.88 for moral evaluation, 0.91 for treatment recommendation, and 0.88 for capacity-threshold position, with a mean of 0.86 across the five codes; observed agreement was 0.93 on four of them and 0.80 on causal diagnosis. These are values conventionally described as substantial to almost perfect (Landis and Koch, 1977). The per-function figures are reported in Supplementary Table S3 and the full dual coding, article by article, in Supplementary Table S4. These figures are reported for transparency rather than as validation. They index the clarity of the category scheme, not the correctness of any particular reading: a frame is not made true by two readers converging on it, and the interpretive claims advanced below rest on the textual evidence presented, not on the coefficients.

4 Results

Table 1 summarizes the framing patterns identified across the three outlets for the full corpus (N = 40), organized by Entman’s (1993) four functions; the Kompas.com column therefore reflects its general news and its Lestari desk together. The counts reported in Sections 4.4–4.6 and in Tables 2, 3 rest on the 29 news items that form the main corpus. Sections 4.1–4.7 discuss these items, drawing on specific articles by corpus code; Section 4.8 reports the Lestari desk and the analysis and opinion items separately.

Table 1. Framing matrix by Entman’s (1993) functions and news outlet.

Table 2. Distribution of capacity-threshold readings.

Main corpus (news items outside the Lestari desk) and items reported separately.

Table 3. Distribution of moral-evaluation readings and predominant remedy.

Main corpus and items reported separately.

4.1 Framing in Detik.com

Coverage in Detik.com (n = 9) centers on the operational dimension of the government's response: the establishment and expansion of public kitchens, the repair of the Bailey bridges connecting Bireuen and Takengon, presidential field visits, and search-and-rescue operations. The dominant problem definition is logistical, an urgent need to feed, shelter, and rescue large numbers of displaced people, rather than a question of policy or governance failure (D01, D04, D09). Causal diagnosis in this outlet is limited: articles attribute the scale of need to the magnitude of the disaster and the difficulty of the terrain, rather than to upstream drivers such as land-use policy or deforestation.

The moral evaluation embedded in this coverage consistently positions the state—particularly the president, the Ministry of Social Affairs, and Basarnas—as responsive, coordinated, and present. Repeated site visits by President Prabowo, his instruction assigning the Army Chief of Staff to lead a bridge-repair task force, and the ministry's rapid establishment of public kitchens are reported as evidence of an active, functioning state apparatus (D05, D08). Continued search operations by Basarnas, despite the technical difficulty posed by hardening mud at burial sites, are similarly framed as a matter of professional persistence rather than institutional strain (D06). The recommended course of action that follows from this framing is consistently short-term and technocratic: expand public-kitchen capacity, continue search and rescue, and accelerate infrastructure repair, with little discussion of longer-term policy reform. This operational, government-affirming register is broadly consistent with prior comparative framing studies of the coverage of government-related news by Indonesian national portals, including Detik.com (Maududi et al., 2025).

4.2 Framing in Kompas.com

Coverage in the general news of Kompas.com (n = 7) combines straight reporting on government statements with expert-sourced reporting on the causes of the disaster. A recurring problem definition concerns the contested decision not to declare a national disaster: articles report President Prabowo's own justification, that the state remains capable of managing the response without the additional authority a national-disaster declaration would confer, alongside civil-society and legal commentary questioning that justification (K02, K09, K15).

A second thread concerns ecological causation. One general news item cites a Universitas Brawijaya conservation scientist's assessment that the flood “mirrors a crisis in landscape governance” (K06); this thread is far more prominent in the Lestari desk, reported in Section 4.8. The causal diagnosis extends the moral evaluation beyond the immediate emergency response to the policy decisions that preceded it, among them land-use permitting and weak environmental-impact-assessment enforcement.

The moral evaluation running through this coverage is more evaluative than that of Detik.com: the state's claimed capacity is tested against field-level readiness and structural accountability rather than affirmed by default, and five of the seven items render delay or inadequacy as a failure of obligation. The remedies are dispersed, ranging from stronger translation of early warning into preparedness (K01) to continued central intervention and scrutiny of the national-disaster-status decision (K09, K15); no single remedy predominates.

4.3 Framing in Waspada.id

Coverage in Waspada.id (n = 13), reflecting its position as a Medan-based outlet with distribution reaching Aceh, foregrounds the humanitarian and moral dimension of the disaster more consistently than the two national outlets. Its dominant problem definition centers on the mismatch between the scale of the disaster and the capacity of regional government: repeated coverage of district legislators, youth organizations, and civil-society coalitions demanding that the central government declare a national disaster reflects a shared premise that local and provincial resources have been exhausted (W01, W02, W03, W08, W13, W19), a pattern of localized flood-narrative construction consistent with other Indonesian regional flood coverage (Mondry, 2019).

One article in the corpus documents the clearest instance of this exhaustion: the regent of South Aceh, Mirwan MS, publicly stated, under the headline metaphor of raising the white flag, that his administration could not independently manage the district's flood and landslide response, and formally requested that the provincial government assume control (W18).

The causal diagnosis in this outlet centers on the fragmentation and slowness of the central response relative to the scale of need, though several articles, particularly one examining a coalition of civil-society and environmental groups, also foreground ecological causation, describing the disaster as “not an ordinary natural event, but an ecosystem disaster born of an accumulation of spatial-governance errors” (W22). The most critical article in the corpus goes further, attributing continued suffering, including reports of hunger in Central Aceh, Gayo Lues, and Bener Meriah twenty days into the response, to inaccurate information reaching the president from subordinates and to weak execution within his cabinet, while notably sparing the president himself from direct blame: “the president said the state is capable of handling this on its own, but why are people still being left hungry” (W10). The moral evaluation here is the most pointed in the corpus: the legitimacy of the state is measured directly against the speed with which basic needs are met, and delay is read as a moral and legitimacy failure rather than a merely administrative one.

The remedies this coverage foregrounds are consistently oriented toward central intervention: declaring a national disaster, accelerating logistics and evacuation, and, in the case of Governor Mualem's acceptance of foreign assistance, prioritizing humanitarian need over the provenance of aid (W09). Coverage of the attention paid by the Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection to gender- and age-specific needs in evacuation sites (W23) further extends this humanitarian register, foregrounding needs-based rather than uniform assistance as a marker of an adequately responsive state.

4.4 A shared question

Framing theory, and the national-local hierarchy documented in prior Indonesian flood research, would lead one to expect that a national outlet oriented toward government performance might simply not raise 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, and none can be described as excluding it from the agenda. Table 2 reports the distribution.

The question recurs with increasing insistence across the three outlets, and does so in the direction the national-local hierarchy would predict, sparsest at the two national outlets and near-ubiquitous at Waspada.id. But the difference is one of emphasis rather than exclusion. Four of the nine Detik.com items and three of the seven Kompas.com news items raise the threshold question, and one Detik.com item proceeds from the premise that subnational capacity has already been exhausted. The national outlet standing closest to the government's operational account did not keep the constitutional question off its pages.

This finding is worth stating plainly because it disconfirms a plausible expectation. Where framing analysis often locates the exercise of media power in what is excluded from view, the Sumatra case shows a shared agenda: all three outlets placed before their readers the question of whether regional government could still cope. Divergence in this corpus lies downstream of agenda, in the verdict returned and the remedy prescribed.

4.5 Divergent verdicts

Where the outlets converge on agenda, they divide sharply on moral evaluation. Table 3 reports this alongside the remedy that predominates in each outlet's coverage.

The division is close to categorical. Detik.com renders state conduct as responsive and capable in six of its nine items, and in none does it render conduct as a moral or legitimacy failure; its register runs from favorable to neutral, with the censorious pole absent altogether. Kompas.com and Waspada.id invert this almost exactly, framing delay or inadequacy as a failure of obligation rather than an administrative shortfall in five of seven and nine of thirteen news items respectively. What distinguishes these readings is not severity of tone but the kind of claim being made: an administrative shortfall calls for better execution, whereas a failure of obligation calls the relationship between state and citizen into question.

What makes this divergence analytically interesting is that it coexists with the shared agenda documented above. These outlets were not reporting different events, nor asking different questions. The coverage of the capacity question in Detik.com reports the government's own account of it: the assignment of a bridge task force under the Army Chief of Staff (D05), the president's repeated field visits (D08), and the expansion of public kitchens from twenty-eight to thirty-nine (D01, D09). The verdict returned is that capacity holds. The Ministry of Social Affairs is reported as having “set up 28 public kitchens serving 50,000 flood victims” within days of the disaster (D01), and Basarnas as continuing search operations “for as long as they remain effective” (D06).

Kompas.com and Waspada.id return the opposite verdict from the same question, and ground it differently. Kompas.com grounds it in expert and civil-society testimony: a Universitas Brawijaya conservation scientist's assessment that the flood “mirrors a crisis in landscape governance” (K06). This ecological reading is not idiosyncratic to the outlet: bibliometric mapping of disaster-mitigation and deforestation research on North Sumatra identifies policy governance as the principal link between forest loss and flood risk in the province, the same causal chain the sources of Kompas.com articulate (Fandhy et al., 2026). Outside the main corpus, the same verdict is reinforced by non-ecological testimony: a coalition of 113 organizations formally demanding declaration (K10, Lestari desk) and a former Aceh-Nias reconstruction official's judgment that the absence of national status was itself slowing the field response (K17, explainer). Waspada.id grounds its verdict instead in administrative record and in the voices of regional actors: the public statement by the regent of South Aceh, under the headline metaphor of raising the white flag, that his administration could not independently manage the response, together with his formal request that the province assume control (W18); district legislators and civil-society coalitions demanding national status (W01, W03, W13); and the charge that “the president said the state is capable of handling this on its own, but why are people still being left hungry” (W10). The three outlets thus differ in sourcing as well as verdict: Detik.com relies on central officials, Kompas.com on experts and civil society, and Waspada.id on regional officials, legislators, and local organizations.

4.6 Divergent remedies

The most consequential divergence lies in remedy. The remedy predominating in Detik.com and in Waspada.id points toward a different level and kind of intervention, and the two are not straightforwardly compatible; the general news of Kompas.com sits between them.

Detik.com concentrates on short-term operational measures, which predominate in five of its nine items: expanded logistics, continued search and rescue, repair of roads and bridges. The characteristic remedy in Waspada.id is the national-disaster declaration itself, predominating in seven of thirteen news items, with immediate operational relief in four more. The general news of Kompas.com shows no predominant remedy: stronger central intervention or review of national status appears in three of seven items, and operational relief, ecological reform, preparedness, and needs-based assistance in one each. Ecological and spatial-planning reform, which earlier drafts of this study treated as the characteristic Kompas.com remedy, is concentrated in the Lestari desk (Section 4.8).

These are not intensities of the same prescription but distinct theories of what went wrong and what would prevent recurrence. The operational remedy implies that the response mechanism is sound and requires resourcing. The status remedy implies that the mechanism is sound but wrongly triggered, that the failure lies in the withholding of an authority transfer the statute provides for. The ecological remedy, carried chiefly by the Lestari desk, implies that the disaster was generated upstream by land-use governance and that no improvement in emergency response would have prevented it. Each outlet offers a coherent account of what should change; taken together, the accounts pull in different directions.

4.7 Asymmetric blame attribution

A further finding concerns the internal structure of criticism where it appears. The sharpest attack on government performance in the corpus (W10) reports that twenty days into the response, residents of Central Aceh, Gayo Lues, and Bener Meriah remained without adequate food, and that the president's own claim of capacity was contradicted by field conditions. Yet the causal diagnosis of that article attributes the failure not to the president but to inaccurate reporting reaching him from subordinates and to weak execution within his cabinet. The president is positioned as deceived rather than responsible.

This structure of blame is consistent with patterns Irawanto (2018) observes in Indonesian disaster reporting, in which national leadership is more readily insulated from direct culpability than the bureaucratic apparatus beneath it. Its significance here is that it qualifies the finding of regional-outlet criticality. Waspada.id is indeed the most critical outlet in the corpus, and the one most insistent that the capacity threshold has been crossed, but its criticism operates within a frame of presidential legitimacy rather than against it. Waspada.id demanded that the center intervene more forcefully; it did not question the authority of the center to do so. Criticism of central performance and affirmation of central authority prove entirely compatible.

4.8 Items reported separately: the Lestari desk and analysis and opinion pieces

The six Lestari items (K03, K07, K10, K11, K13, K14) are the most uniform group in the corpus. Five of six render state conduct as a failure of obligation and one as a structural accountability failure; four of six recommend ecological and spatial-planning reform, one a national-disaster declaration, and one strengthened preparedness. Four of six raise the threshold question. The desk's sources are forestry and hydrology specialists and environmental organizations: a Walhi campaign manager's argument that “blaming the weather alone is not a wise position” (K13) is representative. Had these items been pooled with the general news of Kompas.com, ecological reform would have appeared as the outlet's characteristic remedy; kept apart, it is the characteristic remedy of one desk.

The five analysis and opinion items (K05, K08, K12, K17, W07) are evaluative by genre and were kept out of the cross-outlet counts for that reason. Three of five render state conduct as a failure of obligation and one as a structural accountability failure. Their remedies are dispersed: a national-disaster declaration (K17, W07), ecological reform (K05), stronger central intervention (K08), and preparedness (K12). The Kompas.com analysis of the four Aceh district heads who stated that their administrations could no longer manage the disaster reads this not as a failure to be dismissed but as “a call for systemic reform, in which the center is no longer the last-resort hero but a proactive partner to the regions” (K08). None of these items changes the direction of the findings in Sections 4.4–4.6.

5 Discussion

5.1 Alignment expressed through verdict, not exclusion

The first claim following from these findings is empirical and, in a modest way, corrective. The national-local hierarchy documented in prior Indonesian flood scholarship (Pinontoan and Wahid, 2020; Wardyaningrum, 2022) is legible in this corpus, but it does not operate through agenda exclusion. Detik.com raised the capacity question in nearly half its items, and once in terms conceding that capacity had been exhausted. A reading that inferred government-aligned coverage from the absence of contested questions would misdescribe this case: the alignment is expressed in the verdict returned and the remedy prescribed, not in what is permitted onto the page. This is consistent with Oktavian et al. (2026), who found national online outlets in the first days of the disaster presenting government actors chiefly as responders.

5.2 Decoupling problem definition from treatment recommendation

The second claim is theoretical. Entman’s (1993) account distinguishes problem definition from treatment recommendation but does not specify how tightly the two are coupled. This corpus suggests the coupling can be loose in a particular and consequential way: outlets may converge on the problem agenda while diverging on remedy so completely that their prescriptions are incompatible. All three outlets treat the flooding as a severe emergency, and all three raise the question of whether regional capacity sufficed. Yet one prescribes better logistics, one prescribes a transfer of constitutional authority, and the third, in its general news, prescribes no single remedy while its environment desk prescribes land-use reform. Where framing scholarship often treats remedy as following from problem definition, the Sumatra case indicates that remedy selection can operate as a relatively independent site of contest and, in decentralized systems, as the site where the locus of authority is actually argued.

5.3 Remedy divergence and the range of reform arguments in the news

The third point concerns what the divergence in remedy means for debate about disaster governance. Indonesian scholarship has documented a persistent gap between the formal authority regional disaster agencies hold and the capacity available to them (Amrullah, 2023; Fikri et al., 2025; Putra and Matsuyuki, 2019). The reform that addresses this gap most directly is clarification of when central assumption of command becomes obligatory, for instance through explicit triggers in the statute. In this corpus, that argument appears mainly in Waspada.id, where a national-disaster declaration is the predominant remedy in 7 of 13 news items; across the 16 news items of the two national outlets it predominates in 3.

If this pattern holds beyond the present corpus, it has a practical implication. 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 of these is a reasonable account of what should change. They are, however, 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.

We state this as an implication of the texts and not as a finding about audiences. Whether readers of these outlets formed different expectations of government is a question for reception research, which this study did not undertake.

5.4 Implications for the watchdog role of the press

The findings also bear on the watchdog function of Indonesian online news. Scrutiny of government was present in the corpus but unevenly distributed and aimed at different objects. Kompas.com directed it at preparedness and the status decision and, through its environment desk, at land-use governance; Waspada.id directed it at the speed and adequacy of the central response; Detik.com, whose items are short and built around official statements, carried little evaluative content of its own. This is consistent with the differences in format and sourcing described in Section 3.2: an outlet organized around speed and official sources has less room for scrutiny than one that commissions expert commentary or one that reports from within the affected region.

A further qualification comes from the most critical article in the corpus (W10), which attributes the failures it reports to subordinates and to weak execution in the cabinet while sparing the president, a pattern Irawanto (2018) also observes in Indonesian disaster reporting. Watchdog scrutiny, where it appeared, was directed at performance and stopped short of questioning the authority of the center to act.

5.5 Limitations

Several limitations should be considered when interpreting these findings. First, the corpus was reconstructed after earlier retrieval records became unavailable. Every article was verified against its source, but some qualifying articles may not have been recovered, so the corpus is purposive and not exhaustive.

Second, the numbers are small and unequal across outlets. Claims about Detik.com rest on nine items and claims about Kompas.com on seven general news items, and both should be read with caution. Six Kompas.com articles from the Lestari desk and five analysis and opinion items were excluded from the cross-outlet comparison and are reported separately; what is said about Kompas.com in that comparison refers to its general news coverage.

Third, both coders are members of the author team, and coding by readers outside the team would be a stronger test. Agreement was lowest on causal diagnosis (kappa = 0.75), because many articles name more than one cause; conclusions in this article therefore rest mainly on moral evaluation, treatment recommendation, and threshold stance, where agreement was higher.

Fourth, the dominant-category rule records one category per function and so compresses articles that carry two frames of similar weight. Supplementary Table S4 shows each such case.

Fifth, the study analyzes media texts only. It did not examine audiences, comments, or social media, and it makes no claim about how the coverage was received.

Finally, the period studied (27 November 2025–2 January 2026) extends into January because the government's fullest explanation of its decision on national status was published then.

6 Conclusion

This study examined how Detik.com, Kompas.com, and Waspada.id framed the government's response to the 2025 Sumatra floods, coding forty articles on Entman's four framing functions and on one additional case-specific code for stance toward the national-disaster threshold.

The main finding is that the outlets differed less in whether they raised the threshold question than in the verdict and remedy they attached to it. Detik.com presented state conduct as capable and carried no moral censure; Kompas.com and Waspada.id predominantly presented delay as a failure of obligation. Remedies differed as well: operational measures predominated in Detik.com and a national-disaster declaration in Waspada.id, while the general news of Kompas.com was dispersed across remedies, with ecological reform concentrated in its environment desk.

The contribution to framing research is a modest one. Entman's model separates problem definition from treatment recommendation without specifying how closely the two are tied. 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 argued.

Future research could test this pattern in other Indonesian disasters where national status was disputed, study reception directly, and apply computational or network methods to the wider debate, including the actors and social media exchanges that this study did not cover.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. A generative AI assistant, Claude Anthropic, was used in the preparation of this manuscript, as described in the Acknowledgments. It assisted with locating and extracting source material from online news archives, drafting and editing manuscript prose, and checking citation–reference consistency. It was not used to perform the framing coding or to make any analytical judgment. The authors verified all content, including quotations, citations, and references, and take full responsibility for the manuscript.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1988712/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Dimiter Velev, University of National and World Economy, Bulgaria

Reviewed by: Nevrettia Christantyawati, Universitas Dr. Soetomo, Indonesia

Rachmi Siregar, Universitas Budi Luhur, Indonesia