Shafezah Abdul Wahab, *Muhammad Hakimi Tew Abdullah

Abstract:

Integrating social media platforms like Twitter into election coverage has transformed information dissemination, making it important for political discourse. This study examines how Bernama, a government-linked news agency in Malaysia, used Twitter during Malaysia’s 15th General Election (GE15), focusing on the role of media framing. Media framing is the intentional presentation of information aimed at influencing audience perceptions, significantly shaping voter attitudes, and constructing political narratives. A total of 1,103 tweets from Bernama were analysed through quantitative content analysis, and an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted to identify key constructs, assess item quality, and evaluate construct validity. The findings reveal that most factors obtained Cronbach’s Alpha values of between 0.5 and 0.9, demonstrating acceptable to excellent reliability. The study highlights two major challenges, which are media prejudice, where biased reporting influences public opinion, and media restrictions, which limit the depth and objectivity of coverage due to internal or external pressures.

Keywords: Media framing, election discourse, media narrative analysis, Twitter, exploratory factor analysis