A Corpus Analysis of the Reliability of the Verbs in Covid-19 Related News in Indonesia

Abstract

This research aims to analyze how media articles in 2020 use verbs to express the reliability (probability and likelihood of something happening) based on Bednarek media evaluation (2006) and explore the characteristics of news related to COVID-19 in Indonesia. Combined with corpus analysis, this study had analyzed the reliability level of modal verbs from a 300,000-word corpus compiled from about 600 COVID-19 related news published by the Jakarta Post in 2020. Researchers found four verbs as the keywords indicating the reliability of news related to COVID-19 in Indonesia. The two verbs are considered to have high-reliability values, for example, reported and confirmed. At the same time, the other two verbs are considered to have medium-level reliability, such as expected and suspected. Reliability keywords are used as predictions, opportunities, guesses, and reporting past events. Many keyword uses are accompanied by information from government officials, some experts, and many researchers. Therefore, the COVID-19 news in Indonesia is portrayed with a high likelihood of its events happening.