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

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.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yating Yu ◽  
Mark Nartey

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
Cynthia Wang

This article intends to reveal the power dimensions and ideological positions embedded in dominant media discourses. Informed by theories of media representation as well as those of colonialism and Orientalism, this article analyses eight articles from two British daily online news media sources, namely, The Guardian and The Telegraph. The methodological framework adopted draws on Fairclough's (1995) conception of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine textual features, and employs Bazzi's contextual analysis model with an emphasis on ideology. These methodologies are utilised in an effort to investigate the British media's representational and discursive strategies concerning a wave of stabbing incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the six-month violence between October 2015 and March 2016. The results indicate that violent actions are framed in a binary fashion, between self and other, and that the discursive strategies employed position Palestinian subjects as unworthy victims or violent initiators, whereas Israelis were represented relatively positively, in order to inscribe the accepted values in British society and foreign policy. This article attempts to contribute to the discussion on the impact of media agencies embedded within a particular societal and political context, and comments upon their ability to foster and disseminate hegemonic ideologies, which in turn reinforce systemic power inequalities in times of conflict.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 621-649
Author(s):  
Yves Pepermans ◽  
Pieter Maeseele

This article examines if and how news media contribute to manufacturing consent by disabling ideological disagreement about established social structures underlying climate disruption. A critical discourse analysis reveals three discursive constructions emerging in two Belgian elite newspapers and one alternative news site during four climate summits (2000-2012). Despite advocating different policy approaches based on opposing ideological preferences, the newspapers were found to manufacture consent about these preferences by relying on depoliticizing discursive strategies. Only during Conferences of the Parties 18, ideological disagreement about alternative policy frameworks was enabled in the alternative news site and opinionated sections of one newspaper, by relying on politicizing strategies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-69
Author(s):  
Gideon Abioye Oyedeji ◽  
◽  
Nabila Idoko Idris ◽  

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebuka Elias Igwebuike

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inge J.P.A. Verdonschot ◽  
Johannes von Engelhardt

Representations of suffering between adventure news and agency news.A critical discourse analysis on the representation of the 2010 Pakistan floods on Dutch television. Representations of suffering between adventure news and agency news.A critical discourse analysis on the representation of the 2010 Pakistan floods on Dutch television. In July 2010, unprecedented floods hit Pakistan, leaving millions of people homeless and affecting the lives of over 18 million people. Based in the literature on media representations of non-Western disaster, this study investigates how Dutch news media covered this particular instance of distant suffering. A critical discourse analysis was conducted, exploring the ways in which the event was presented and explained to Dutch audiences during the first month of the crisis in the NOS Journaal and the telethon ‘Actie Pakistan’. Building on Chouliaraki’s analytical model (2006), the study shows how specific modes of representation might have served to disallow or facilitate moral engagement of the spectator. Analysis also reveals how Dutch media gradually moved from reporting on the crisis as ‘adventure’, towards humanitarian ‘emergency’. Simultaneously, by playing in on the Otherness of the Pakistani people, asymmetrical dichotomies between the passive distant victim and the Western spectator are upheld.


TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Gigit Eklesia ◽  
Akhyar Rido

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174804852098744
Author(s):  
Ke Li ◽  
Qiang Zhang

Media representations have significant power to shape opinions and influence public response to communities or groups around the world. This study investigates media representations of Islam and Muslims in the American media, drawing upon an analysis of reports in the New York Times over a 17-year period (from Jan.1, 2000 to Dec. 31, 2016) within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. It examines how Islam and Muslims are represented in media coverage and how discursive power is penetrated step by step through such media representations. Most important, it investigates whether Islam and Muslims have been stigmatized through stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. The findings reveal that the New York Times’ representations of Islam and Muslims are negative and stereotypical: Islam is stereotyped as the unacclimatized outsider and the turmoil maker and Muslims as the negative receiver. The stereotypes contribute to people’s prejudice, such as Islamophobia from the “us” group and fear of the “them” group but do not support a strong conclusion of discrimination.


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