Individual Media Dependency on Jakarta Election Report 2017: A Prelimenary Study on the Structural Location of Prospective Voters in Media System Dependency Theory

Jakarta's gubernatorial race became the most competitive political contest among 101 regional election that was organized simultaneously in 2017.Black campaigns using religious issues as a major winning strategy hit the people and made a tense situation. This material was systematically and massively disseminated through various media platforms.Flow of information has been much more abundant with the negative sentiments of religion. Manipulative and provocative lies hit the audiences. Some clashes and frictions happened as an indication of split in the people of Jakarta due to differences in political choice. Using the media system dependency theory to portrait Jakarta election phenomenon, the relationship between the media system and the political system is strongly established at the macro level. In the ecological concept that binds the relationship between the media system, society, and audience, the audiencede pendency on the media system seem to be asymmetric. This study aims to ex-plore structural location variables which are defined as demographic backgrounds that are important to be used as control variables in an advanced research that will test the model of media dependency relation and audiences in the context of Jakarta elections. Demographic backgrounds, ie sex, ethnicity, religion, age, education, and occupation are placed as independent variables that are tested for their influence on the dependent variable of individual dependency on the media as news source about the Jakarta elections. With binary logistic regression analysis, data from 724 field survey respondents were tested and found out education, age, and religion to be key predictors. These results do not appear for gender, ethnicity, and occupation. The use of newspapers, television, online news portals, and social media to meet the information needs of election depends on age and education variation while religion affects three of them except social media. Radio proved unaffected by demographic background.