Studies in Literature and Language
“It Isn’t Corruption, It’s Just Stealing”: An Experiential Metafunctional Analysis of Newspaper Reportage of Corruption Cases Among Political Office Holders in Nigeria
Abstract
This study identifies linguistic strategies deployed by Nigerian newspapers to frame corruption involving Nigerian political elites, drawing insights from Halliday’s experiential metafunction. It examines how transitivity choices, particularly the choices of processes, construct meanings that reflect underlying ideological leanings. The study aims to uncover how language in media discourse functions not only to convey information but also to shape public perception of corruption, power, and accountability. The study employs both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary data comprises fifteen purposively selected news reports, five each from Punch, The Sun, and Leadership newspapers, published between May 2022 and June 2024. The three newspaper organizations are chosen because they are among the top broadsheets in terms of readership in Nigeria. The time-frame is chosen because there were a lot of corruption cases reported among political office holders by the Nigerian news organizations within that period. The study reveals that transitivity choices in the newspaper reports are ideologically motivated. The political elites were portrayed as not being culpable of financial misconduct. The study also shows that the newspaper consistently made choices of institutions and anonymous persons as the accusers of political elites on financial misappropriation. This way, the newspapers try to appear neutral in reporting sensitive cases. Furthermore, process choices were used to obscure culpable political leaders and depersonalize corruption, ultimately reflecting a broader strategy to protect the image of these individuals. The study concludes that newspapers do not act as neutral observers in the discourse on corruption, rather, they deliberately choose grammatical structures that ideologically help to shape the representation of corruption.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13899
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