Lexico-Stylistic Choices and Media Ideology in Newspaper Reports on Niger Delta Conflicts

Abstract

Media reports on Niger Delta (Henceforth, ND) conflicts have reflected a relationship between lexico-stylistic choices and media ideologies. The existing media studies on the discourse have predominantly utilised pragmatic, stylistic and discourse analytical tools in presenting and labelling discourse participants and/or their ideologies, but neglected how media ideologies can be revealed through lexico-stylistic choices made in the reports. This paper therefore examines the lexico-stylistic choices in the reports in order to establish their link to specific ideological goals of the newspapers in relaying the conflict news. Forty reports on ND conflicts, published between 2003 and 2007, sampled from two ND-based (The Tide and Pioneer) and two national (The Punch and THISDAY) newspapers, were subjected to stylistic and critical analyses, with insights from structural (relational) semantics and aspects of stylistics discourse. Two broad lexical stylistic choices are identified, including paradigmatic (61.8%-indexed by synonymous, antonymous, hyponymous, colloquial, and register items, and coinages) and syntagmatic (38.2%-marked by collocations, metaphors, pleonasms, and lexical fields) features. The features are utilised for three ideological ends; namely, picking out and framing participants as perpetrators of the violence in the discourse, evaluating specific entities and their roles in the conflicts, and reducing the impact of the activities of the news actors. Although there are overlaps, the evaluative ideology is largely associated with the national newspaper, the impact reduction ideology with the ND-based newspapers, while the framist ideology is observed in the two sets of newspapers. With these findings the study has added the lexical stylistics angle to the existing scholarship on ND conflict news discourse. Thus, the newspaper reports on ND conflicts are motivated by their ideological goals to change the reader's outlook on the issues relating to the conflicts.

Participant’s Roles and Cognitive Relations in Niger Delta Conflict News Discourse

“…Thus, based on the research questions guiding the study, the data for this study consist of print newspaper reports on ND conflicts, published between 2003 and 2009. To research ND conflicts here is not based on random pockets of violence in the ND region, but rather we focused on the social activities identified with the major ND conflict participants in an earlier broader study (see Ononye, 2014). These conflict activities have been categorized in Table 1 below.…”

“…He identifies five register labels-oil struggle, oil facilities, crisis location, news reporting, and participant-related registers-and suggests that the labels have specific ideologies, which can be undertaken by subsequent studies. For Ononye (2017), specific media ideologies by the media inform specific stylistic choices made in order for news texts to do such things as: framing participants, evaluating specific entities, and reducing the impact of the activities of specific news actors. Generally, these critical works can be distinguished from the present study particularly in terms of theoretical focus.…”

“…In corollary, the violence, including the vandalization of oil facilities, kidnapping of expatriate oil workers, and clashes with the governments' task forces, have consistently been reported in the newspapers and other media within and outside the region. These reports have produced an important sub-genre of ND discourse known as ND conflict media discourse (Ononye, 2014), which has attracted the attention of many scholars in Nigeria. In what follows shortly here, we reflect on what some earlier scholars have done on the ND discourse sub-genre with a view to situating the present attempt within the gaps in the earlier studies.…”

Attitude Realization in News Reports: An Interpretation Through an Appraisal Analysis

“…Texts are defining terms of social practices (Fairclough, 1995) that are related to social relations and the historical context (Janks, 1997). The central concern of CDA is to de-mystify the ideologies and power by the systematic evaluation of semiotic data (Wodak & Meyer, 2009) that can also represent ideologies through the lexico-stylistic choice of the texts (Ononye, 2017).…”

Rapport-management strategies in conflict situations

“…Poor management of social relations has been identified as one of the factors that have fuelled intra-group conflicts in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria (Ononye 2014). Within this region, for example, different groups exist which employ diverse social identity formationssuch as, among others, positioning and self-presentationin referring to themselves (and other groups) in order to legitimise their motives and ultimately pursue their own interests.…”