Constructing Professional Legitimacy: Audience Reception of Hijab-Wearing Television News Anchors on Indonesian Social Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21111/ettisal.v11i2.4Keywords:
Hijab-Wearing Television News Anchors, Professional Legitimacy, Audience Reception Theory, Digital Journalism, Social Construction of Reality, Social Media InteractionAbstract
Television news anchors occupy highly visible professional positions in which journalistic identity intersects with personal and social representation. For Muslim women who wear the hijab, visible religious identity may become an important element through which audiences interpret their public and professional image. Although previous studies have examined Muslim women journalists in relation to representation, gender, and newsroom practices, less attention has been given to how digital audiences negotiate the professional legitimacy of hijab-wearing television news anchors through social media interactions. This study examines how audiences interpret and negotiate the professional legitimacy of three Indonesian television news anchors—Yaumi Fitri, Eva Yunizar, and Rahma Hayuningdyah—through comments on Instagram and YouTube. Employing a qualitative digital reception analysis, the study analyzes 169 publicly available audience comments associated with 24 social media posts collected in 2024. The comments were manually coded and analyzed thematically, drawing on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework and Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality. The findings reveal three interrelated patterns. First, audiences express religious appreciation, personal admiration, and recognition of the anchors’ visible religious identity, although their responses are not entirely uniform. Second, audience interpretations involve both dominant-hegemonic and negotiated readings, particularly concerning religious commitment, expectations of consistency, and visual appearance, while clear oppositional readings are limited in the selected data. Third, digital audience participation provides a space in which the compatibility between visible religious identity and professional journalism is socially recognized and negotiated. This study contributes to audience reception research by demonstrating how digital interactions participate in the social negotiation of professional identity, while distinguishing public recognition from formal institutional legitimacy and demonstrated journalistic competence.
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