Sarawak Elections and Midterm Transition Government 2020: Understanding the Public’s Perception of the Mediatization and Populism Approach through the Media Content of Newspapers

Abstract

This study aims to understand the public’s perception by looking into media news content analysis and surveying of public perception of seven of Sarawak’s newspapers namely Borneo Post, New Sarawak Tribune, Utusan Sarawak, Utusan Borneo, Suara Sarawak, See Hua Daily and Sin Chew Daily were examined. The understanding of the impacts on mediatization of politics and populism towards public perception with Sarawak’s newspapers towards the electoral democracy during Sarawak’s election and Midterm Transition of Malaysia Government 2020 were analysed based on an online survey. The analysis was constructed on 384 respondents using factor analysis (FA) and regression to examine the role of mediatization of politics and populism towards the opinion and perception of the people of Sarawak. The result shows that mediatization of politics scored a total of more than 10% impact towards the opinion and perception of Sarawak’s people where media logic proved an impact of 17% and political logic showed a 12.5% impact. Populism also evinced that a 14.1% impact towards the Sarawak people’s perception.