Marginality and otherness: the discursive construction of LGBT issues/people in the Ghanaian news media

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110455
Author(s):  
Mark Nartey
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
Socially Responsible ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Lgbt Issues ◽  
Lgbt People

In recent years, LGBT issues have received substantial media attention and engendered heated public debate in Ghana. This paper analyzes the prejudiced construction of LGBT issues in the Ghanaian news media and how this contributes to a discriminatory discourse that demeans LGBT people and puts them at the periphery of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and a dataset of 385 articles, comprising news reports, op-ed pieces, and editorials. The analysis reveals that news content on LGBT issues is biased and inflammatory, and it frames LGBT people as expendables and undesirables. This is realized by exploiting three discourses, or forms of othering, that culminate into the (re)production and naturalization of moral panic: a discourse of amorality/immorality and societal destruction, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of medicalization or pathologization. The paper concludes with a call for a more balanced and ethically/socially responsible news reporting, especially since LGBT issues in Ghana hold implications for national cohesion and security.

Constructing undesirables: A critical discourse analysis of othering of Fulani nomads in the Ghanaian news media

2021 ◽  
pp. 175048132098209
Author(s):  
Mark Nartey ◽  
Hans J Ladegaard
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Content Organization

The activities of Fulani nomads in Ghana have gained considerable media attention and engendered continuing public debate. In this paper, we analyze the prejudiced portrayals of the nomads in the Ghanaian news media, and how these contribute to an exclusionist and a discriminatory discourse that puts the nomads at the margins of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and draws on a dataset of 160 articles, including news stories, editorials and op-ed pieces. The analysis reveals that the nomads are discursively constructed as undesirables through an othering process that centers on three discourses: a discourse of dangerousness/criminalization, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of stigmatization. This anti-nomad/Fulani rhetoric is evident in the choice of sensational headlines, alarmist news content, organization of arguments, and use of quotations. The paper concludes with a call for more balanced and critical news reporting on the nomads, especially since issues surrounding them border on national cohesion and security.

Constructing the myth of protest masculinity in Chinese English language news media

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yating Yu ◽  
Mark Nartey
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Chinese Media ◽  
Research Attention ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Media

Although the Chinese media’s construction of unmarried citizens as ‘leftover’ has incited much controversy, little research attention has been given to the ways ‘leftover men’ are represented in discourse. To fill this gap, this study performs a critical discourse analysis of 65 English language news reports in Chinese media to investigate the predominant gendered discourses underlying representations of leftover men and the discursive strategies used to construct their identities. The findings show that the media perpetuate a myth of ‘protest masculinity’ by suggesting that poor, single men may become a threat to social harmony due to the shortage of marriageable women in China. Leftover men are represented as poor men, troublemakers and victims via discursive processes that include referential, predicational and aggregation strategies as well as metaphor. This study sheds light on the issues and concerns of a marginalised group whose predicament has not been given much attention in the literature.

The legitimization of the use of sweat shops by H&M in the Swedish press

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Cotal San Martin ◽  
David Machin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Social Action ◽  
News Media ◽  
Global South ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Action Analysis ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Sweat Shops

Abstract In the Swedish news-media we find sporadic critical, or reflective, reporting on the production conditions of Swedish ‘sweat-shop’ factories in the Global South, used to supply Transnational Corporations (TNCs). In this paper we carry out a critical discourse analysis, in particular using Van Leeuwen’s social actor and social action analysis, to look at examples from a larger corpus of 88 news reports and editorials from the Swedish press, between 2012–2017, which report and comment on activities of the Swedish company H&M in relation to its production chains. Analysis reveals how these recontextualize events, processes and motives, to represent Sweden and Swedish TNCs as characterized by a benevolent, democratic, humane, form of capitalism, drawing on discourses of a former social democratic Sweden of the 1960s before it became highly neo-liberalized. This nationalism converges with other discourses promoting the exploitation of the Global South.

Resisting corruption in the Nigerian legislature: A critical discourse analysis of news and opinion articles on legislators’ salaries

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Innocent Chiluwa
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Public Response ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
News Reports

This study analyses news reports of public reactions to the controversial legislators’ monthly/annual income in Nigeria in 2019, which was presumed to far exceed the salaries of legislators worldwide. Data for this study are news and opinion articles published between 2017 and 2019 that represent public response to the salary scandal involving public officers and National Assembly members. Critical discourse analysis is adopted in the analyses of media representations of the main actors in and situations of the scandal. Hence, discursive strategies identified in the resistance discourse of the news media are qualitatively analysed. The study argues that lack of accountability and widespread corruption in the Nigerian political economy is a reflection of weak political institutions, such as those that empower legislators to enrich themselves.

scholarly journals Between facts and ambiguity: Discourses on medical cannabis in Swedish newspapers

2021 ◽  
pp. 145507252199699
Author(s):  
Ernesto Abalo
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Medical Cannabis ◽  
Abstract Form ◽  
Science Discourse ◽  
Strongly Connected ◽  
The Media

Aim: This study examines the discursive construction of medical cannabis in Swedish newspapers, with the aim of understanding how the news media recontextualise the medical potential of cannabis. Design: The study is centred on the concept of recontextualisation, which focuses on how discourses are reinterpreted and reshaped when moving from one context to another, with a special focus on recontextualisation in relation to the media. Methodologically, the study uses critical discourse analysis to qualitatively analyse 134 articles of different subgenres, published in four Swedish newspapers between 2015 and 2020. Results: The study shows that medical cannabis is constructed around myriad topics and contexts, ranging from news that focuses on the medical potential of cannabis to articles where medical cannabis is mentioned in passing and constructed in a more abstract form. The media have difficulties retaining a conceptual boundary between medical and recreational cannabis. Moreover, the study shows that the medical potential of cannabis is discursively constructed using three different discourses: patient discourse, strong science discourse, and weak science discourse. Conclusions: The study suggests that there is a widening of the debate on cannabis in the Swedish public sphere, giving more recognition to the potential medical use of cannabis. The media, however, show difficulties in refining discourses on medical cannabis, which results in an altering between constructions that are strongly connected to science, and those that are not.

scholarly journals A critical discourse analysis of selected news reports of South Africa xenophobic attacks of Nigerians

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-69
Author(s):  
Gideon Abioye Oyedeji ◽  
◽  
Nabila Idoko Idris ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
South African ◽  
News Media ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Colonial Experience

The incessant xenophobic attacks of Nigerians and other foreign nationals in South Africa have generated a unique discourse in the Nigerian media and in fact, other mainstream media on the African continent and international scene. These attacks are viewed by the international community as incompatible with 21st century civility. This paper therefore, engages the reports of selected news media in Nigeria, South African and other media houses with a view to explicating the ideologies that underpin each report seeing through the insight of Van Dijk, Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak’s models of Critical Discourse Analysis. A total of 10 report on the 2015-2019 xenophobia were purposively selected from the online outlets of these media houses. The study therefore found that the use of language by the Nigerian media shows that the polarisation tilted towards emphasising the positive ‘in-group’ description of the heinous acts visited on innocent Nigerians in South Africa whereas the South African and other news media brought to perspective the negative ‘out-group’ description of “some” Nigerians who are engaged in illegal businesses in their South Africa. The lexical choices contribute in significant ways to show the ideologies each reporters represent. The study submits that, these attacks by South Africans on fellow African Nationals are nefarious, iniquitous, atrocious and roguish perhaps because of their colonial experience.

Discursive strategies and ideologies in selected newspaper reports on the Nigerian-Cameroonian Bakassi peninsula border conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebuka Elias Igwebuike
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
Discourse Strategies ◽  
Number Game

News reporting on conflict situations mainly manipulates discursive and representational strategies in portraying people, actions and events either negatively or positively based on certain prejudiced ideologies. This article examines salient discursive strategies deployed by Nigerian and Cameroonian newspapers to represent socio-political ideologies in their reports on the Bakassi Peninsula border conflict. Data comprise 127 instances of discourse strategies drawn from two Nigerian and two Cameroonian English-medium national newspapers published between August 2006 and August 2010. By integrating insights from van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis, findings reveal that both countries’ reports create polarity of positive in-group and negative out-group ideologies through seven discursive strategies which include slanted headlining, negative labelling, evidentiality, number game, hyperbolism, victimization and depersonalization. The strategies embody ideological prejudices of positive self- and negative other-representations which are rife in both nations’ news reports on the disputed Peninsula.

scholarly journals ATTITUDE REALIZATION IN NEWS REPORTS: AN INTERPRETATION THROUGH AN APPRAISAL ANALYSIS

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saira Asad ◽  
Siti Noor Fazelah Binti Mohd Noor ◽  
Rohmani Nur Indah ◽  
Lutfan Bin Jaes
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Online Newspapers ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Appraisal Analysis ◽  
Authorial Voice

For the maintenance of the authorial voice, newspapers use rhetorical markers as an external supporting voice to win their readership. The current five year studies show that news writers maintain engagement with their readers by their stances towards their point of views. This study aimed to find the attitudinal stances of two Pakistani Online newspapers i.e. 'Dawn' (alternative newspaper) and 'The News' (mainstream newspaper). The newspaper's inclination was identified through its language. To discover the newspapers' stances, Martin and White (2005) 'Appraisal Analysis' framework was employed on '2' news reports comprising of '5013' words on Prime Minister Imran Khan's Speech at 74th United Nations' session along with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough (1995). It was found that both newspapers indirectly invoked attitudes by laying evaluative ground which was explicitly explained in the quoted text. The prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan was found the 'Appraiser' in both news reports and served as a main social actor in highlighting Pakistan's current issues. The issues expected to be solved urgently for peace and prosperity in the region by the involvement of world leaders and United Nations on Kashmir conflict between Pakistan and India, climate change and elimination of Islam phobia.

scholarly journals Representation of People with HIV/AIDS in The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe: A Critical Discourse Analysis

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Gigit Eklesia ◽  
Akhyar Rido
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Hiv Positive ◽  
Systemic Functional Grammar ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Material Process ◽  
Hiv Aids

This study aims to understand representational meanings from the transitivity choices used by news reports from The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe in reporting people with HIV-positive cases and exposing the underlying ideology behind the representation. Fairclough’s three-dimensional concept in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was applied in this study. The study also relied on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, particularly in the transitivity analysis. Two selected articles were collected from The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe newspapers. The findings revealed that both news media dominantly report people with HIV/AIDS through material process, then followed by verbal process and relational process. Next, the study found that people with HIV/AIDS are represented as discriminated and threatened group in The Jakarta Post; meanwhile, they are represented as a mistreated group in Jakarta Globe. Last, the study found that The Jakarta Post attempts to construct that people with HIV/AIDS need to be more accepted and protected; meanwhile, Jakarta Globe attempts to construct an idea that people with HIV/AIDS need to be given more attention. To sum up, the combination of the both theories is substantially advantageous in the discourse to expose ideology.

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