Media construction of socio-political crises in Nigeria

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Innocent Chiluwa

This paper attempts to show how social and political crises are constructed, represented/mediated in the Nigerian print media news headlines. Nigeria’s leading newsmagazines and newspapers namely The News, Newswatch, Tell, The Guardian and The Punch are selected for the study. From a corpus of thirty-two news headlines being the publications of the above news media between 2000 and 2006, fifteen headlines and their overlines covering the years that marked the end of military rule and the consolidation of democratic government in Nigeria are purposively selected and analyzed within the framework of the systemic model and critical linguistics. The study shows that socio-political crises have been frequent in Nigeria and that the much anticipated recovery associated with democracy has so far eluded the country. In fact the country has witnessed more social crises, national disasters and ethnic violence in the seven years of civil government than at other times. The study also shows that news headlines — an integral part of media discourse, is an instrument for molding social actions, attitudes and perceptions and are also used as an ideological tool for social criticism. Some of the headlines however, exaggerated the crises and indeed misinformed the general public about the identities and activities of certain people as well as the state of security in Nigeria.

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-380
Author(s):  
Sigita Rackevičienė ◽  
Giedrė Valūnaitė Oleškevičienė ◽  
Klaudija Cheiker

The paper presents the trilingual (English – Lithuanian – Norwegian) analysis of the terms denoting phobia types in mass media discourse. The aim of the paper is threefold: to perform conceptual categorisation of the terms, establish the term formation patterns in the investigated languages, as well as to determine which phobia types were most often discussed in the selected news media sites (“The Guardian”, “DELFI” and “Dagbladet”) over a 10-year period. For the purposes of the research, a trilingual comparable corpus was compiled, from which 268 terms were manually extracted, matched and investigated. The findings of the research provide important information on conceptual, linguistic and social aspects of the phobia terms which may contribute to terminology research in the psychiatry domain.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 515-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahra Mustafa-Awad ◽  
Monika Kirner-Ludwig

This article reports on the first stage of a research project on German university students’ conceptualization of Arab women and to what extent it is affected by the latters’ representation in the Western press during the Arab Spring. We combined discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic approaches to investigate the relationship between lexical items used by the students to express their attitudes toward Arab women and those featuring in news headlines about them published in British, American, and German news media. Results show that the portrayal of Arab women in Western news headlines has a clear impact on German students’ opinions of them. The findings also show that our participants tend to be aware of this effect, which could be partly due to their familiarity with discourse analysis as students of linguistics. These results have implications for incorporating media education systematically in general university courses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 605-632
Author(s):  
Elda Weizman ◽  
Anita Fetzer

Abstract This paper sets up to show how accountability for communicative action is constructed in online journalism as an object of talk, comparing British English and Israeli Hebrew discourse communities. The analysis utilizes a discourse-pragmatic frame of reference supplemented by cognitive semantics and corpus-assisted tools. The discussion draws on data collected from the websites of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, Ha’aretz and Ynet. Focusing on self- and other-positioning of commenters and columnists as citizens, we explore how the accountability of the elite for communicative action and the accountability of their actions to citizens are discursively constructed by ordinary persons (in their role as commenters) and by non-ordinary persons (in their role as columnists, including journalists, experts and authors). The analysis indicates conceptual similarities coupled with discursive differences between the discourse communities under study.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Barlow

This chapter discusses the media construction of women co-offenders and their relationship with their male partner/ co-offender, using the case/ court file material as a comparative tool. It particularly considers the ways in which the women’s representation served to minimise and discredit their perspectives and defence, particularly in relation to the potential influence of their relationship with their male partner on their offending behaviour. It also considers the ways in which the women’s suggestions of coercion or coercive techniques (at varying levels) by their male partner were constructed, particularly in media discourse. In doing so, the chapter is divided into a number of key themes, such as ‘bad women’ and ‘equally bad or worse’. It is important to note that the themes apply to the women at varying levels and the extent to which they were evident in the women’s legal and media representation will be discussed.


2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-13
Author(s):  
Patrick Ensor

Two months after ‘liberating’ Iraq, the Anglo-American authorities in Baghdad decided to control the new and free Iraqi press. Newspapers that publish ‘wild stories’, material deemed provocative or capable of inciting ethnic violence, are being threatened or shut down. A controlled press is a ‘responsible press — just what Saddam Hussein used to say about the press his deposed regime produced. In this edition of Pacific Journalism Review, essays by media commentators present several perspectives on the war and its aftermath. Patrick Ensor gives an overview, Louise Matthews provides media context for the war, John Pilger challenges journalists, Mohamed Al-Bendary profiles the pan-Arab satellite boom, and Alastair Thompson and Russell Brown examine the New Zealand media connection. Cartoonists Steve Bell (The Guardian) and Deven (Le Mauricien) add their views. Critical of the ‘embedded’ media, Bell laments: ‘There’s never been a more dangerous time to be a journalist at war.’


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 01151
Author(s):  
Marina Yu. Ryabova

The article deals with the analysis of graphic-stylistic means of the language, such as punctuation, functioning in modern English based on the language material of literary and media texts (on-line site of The Guardian). The aim of the paper is to reveal some actual functional characteristics of punctuation marks compared with their traditional syntactic and stylistic usage. The linguistic analysis is conducted within the methodology of semantic and syntactic interpretation and description. The following new functional usage of punctuation marks is described: the playing (ludic) function (creating an ironic, comic or parody effect in communication) and the expressive function emphasizing the semantics of an element in a communicative context. The importance of the undertaken analysis is to show the necessity of studying the English punctuation functions from the point of view of modern theory of communication and media linguistics as well as with an empirical educational purpose of teaching the English grammar.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Riris Tiani

The development of pragmatic strategy in the journalistic process has an effect on the image of the person who has been reported. Directly or not, imaging of political figures to public figures is influenced by pragmatic strategies packed with journalists in the news media. Political figures until the public figure collaborate to create an interesting impression. An interesting impression or positive image will change the concept of society over this overnight assessment. The higher the pragmatic power journalists developed in writing the news, the better the quality of the news will be. In accordance with the results of pragmatic strategy research on Headline news on Republika.co.id can be concluded that in the creation of news headlines have implemented pragmatic strategy. The dominant pragmatic strategy used is the illocution act. The illusionary strategy becomes dominant because the news content that is headlined is dominated by political and economic news. So the development of explaination techniques more highlighted.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80
Author(s):  
Jane Louise Ahlstrand

This article examines strategies of ideological polarisation in the discourse of the Indonesian online news media site, Kompas.com. Applying Van Leeuwen’s model of social actor analysis and van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square, the study focuses on the representation of Megawati Soekarnoputri, leader of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) as an icon of ideological contestation during the 2014 presidential election. Situated in the era of digital platform convergence, the analysis uncovers a pattern of strategically ambiguous representations of Megawati and her apparently transgressive actions and interactions. This practice entices readers to ‘read between the lines’ and activate their ideological repertoire to determine in-group and out-group members. It also enables Kompas.com to pursue commercial objectives and navigate journalistic constraints by obscuring explicitly ideological content. The implications are discussed in terms of the impact of online news media discourse upon democratic political engagement, and women’s political participation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (s2) ◽  
pp. 25-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Gynnild

Abstract While staff photographers are losing their jobs, news agency networks have become main suppliers of visual content to the news media. A global news site such as the Guardian leans to news agencies for most of its selected visuals. In tandem with the expanding visual power of new agencies, the ethical standards of the wholesalers are challenged by increasing amounts of user generated content, distant editing, and the live-streaming of breaking news. This article discusses editorial dilemmas prompted by proliferate, high tech processing of visual content by the news agencies’ global networks, exemplified by the coverage of terrorism. The analysis is grounded in a variety of empirical data, and aspects of Manuel Castells’ theory on communication power provide a theorizing framework for the discussion. The study suggests that the visual power of today’s news agencies rests on three interconnected processes of handling imagery: agency infrastructuring, technological infrastructuring and global newsroom infrastructuring.


Journalism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 1300-1319
Author(s):  
Carmen Costa-Sánchez ◽  
Ana-Isabel Rodríguez-Vázquez ◽  
Xosé López-García

Journalism is once again facing a context of technological and social changes. The current stage is characterized for being mobile, multi-screen, and visual. Citizens have adopted with ease the new mobile media for content consumption. Transmedia narratives emerge as structures that can help creators to adapt contents to all platforms and to open the door to new audiences. This article analyzes transmedia strategies in the news offered during the coverage of Greek elections (20-S) by four of the most important news media brands in Europe: El País (ES), The Guardian (UK), La Repubblica (IT), and Público (PT). Results show that mobile platforms have been incorporated into the news coverage following a repurposing strategy as regards web content. The increasing number of published stories, the prioritization of their updating, and the multimedia enrichment make the World Wide Web the main platform of the analyzed practices. The patterns for commenting and sharing do not match, but the most commented and disseminated include multimedia contents.


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