Making inequality speakable: media framing, public emotion, and the language of economic justice in Indonesia

Abstract

Background: Economic inequality in Indonesia is increasingly mediated through public language, where statistics, media narratives, and emotional vocabularies determine how injustice becomes socially recognizable. Objective: This study examines how Indonesian media and public-facing discourse frame economic inequality, organize public emotion, and construct economic justice. Method: This study applies qualitative corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to 36 publicly verifiable media, institutional, civil-society, and scholarly documents, with 16 primary texts coded for framing, affective register, and justice vocabulary. Results: Inequality is most frequently framed through administrative-statistical narrowing, which makes distributional imbalance measurable but can soften moral conflict. Public emotion is organized through technocratic reassurance, anxiety, grievance, vulnerability, cynicism, and solidarity, showing that inequality is not only reported but affectively regulated. Economic justice is articulated through measurable equity, inclusive prosperity, spatial justice, labour dignity, anti-elite accountability, and risk-sensitive protection, revealing competing moral grammars of fairness and responsibility. Implication: These findings show that inequality discourse can clarify public problems while also limiting how suffering, blame, and redistribution are speakable. Novelty: This study advances Indonesian economic discourse research by integrating media framing, affective silence, and justice-vocabulary analysis within one coherent methodological model.