Recontextualizing Public Policy Discourse in English: A Case Study of Instagram Alternative Media “What Is Up, Indonesia?”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35870/ljit.v4i2.8599Keywords:
News value; Visual grammar; Multimodality; Public policy; Generation Z; Citizen journalismAbstract
Social media has changed how public policy issues are communicated to young, English-proficient audiences, yet few studies explain how alternative English-language media reconstruct domestic policy discourse. This study focuses on What Is Up, Indonesia? (WIUI), an Instagram alternative media account that discusses Indonesian public policy issues in English for diaspora audiences, international school students, and English-proficient Generation Z/millennial readers specifically, it analyzes the account's verbal and visual strategies in framing the Free Nutritious Meal program. Using a qualitative-descriptive design, this case study examines the verbal and visual strategies by using Discursive News Values Analysis and visual grammar respectively. The data were drawn on a purposively collected carousel corpus (September 2025) focusing on the news about the Free Nutritious Meal Program. The results in verbal strategies indicate negativity as the most dominant news value constructed through pejorative lexicons, evaluative language, and emotional references. This negativity is legitimized through actor fame and source authority. The visual strategies indicate that representational meaning shifts between conceptual symbolism and vectorial narrative, while compositionally maximum salience through green highlights consistently directs attention to data and authority failures. The study suggests that there is a typical model of public policy recontextualization as a cross-lingual multimodal practice in citizen journalism which integrates meme aesthetics and data-driven reporting for English speaking generation Z and Millennials audiences.
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