Kesantunan Berbahasa sebagai Strategi Etis dalam Praktik Jurnalistik Digital: Kajian Sosiopragmatik

Abstract

The transformation of the digital media ecosystem has compelled journalism to adapt to platform logic, audience metrics, and fast, interactive communication patterns. This study aims to examine how linguistic politeness is realized in digital journalistic practice and to explain its function as an ethical strategy in news production and presentation on digital platforms. This study employs a descriptive qualitative approach with a sociopragmatic perspective through a systematic synthesis of 21 relevant studies published between 2018 and 2024, sourced from Google Scholar, Scopus, and DOAJ databases, selected based on strict inclusion criteria encompassing topic relevance, journal indexation, and methodological quality. The findings indicate that politeness in digital journalism functions as a communicative mechanism that maintains social relations, protects the dignity of news subjects, preserves media credibility, and upholds professional responsibility. The study identifies four dominant politeness strategies: linguistic mitigation (38.1%), balanced attribution (28.6%), epistemic modality (19.0%), and contextual euphemism (14.3%). These percentages reflect the proportion of studies in the 21-article corpus reporting each strategy as the most dominant one. Linguistic politeness functions as a mediating strategy between platform engagement needs and journalistic ethics principles. Based on these findings, this study proposes an integrative three-level sociopragmatic-journalistic model (micro-meso-macro) as an analytical framework for assessing digital news communication quality.