A Multimodal Analysis: Portrayal of Joko Widodo on Tempo Magazine Cover Related to Covid-19 Issues

Abstract

This study aims to identify the elements of verbal and visual that appears in the Tempo magazine's cover portraying Joko Widodo in relation to Covid-19 issues. Six selected Tempo's cover magazines were then selected as the data. The theories used in this research are Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistic. Furthermore, this research used a qualitative descriptive method for data analysis. The findings revealed that the magazine covers critically depict the government's response to the pandemic, with a dominant use of narrative representation, offer interactions, and center compositions. The result also shows that the mostly applied theme in the headlines is marked topical theme and in the subheadlines is unmarked topical theme. Moreover, the cover magazine's headline explained the images. The study demonstrates how multimodal elements work together to convey meaning and influence public perception, contributing to the understanding of multimodal communication in media, particularly in the context of political discourse.