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Browsing Faculty of Arts by Author "Christian-Achinihu Moses Chika"

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    Discursive Farming In Selected Oline News Reports On Epidemis Diseases In Nigeria,2014-2020
    (Department of English,Faculty of Arts,Obafemi Awolowo University., 2024) Christian-Achinihu Moses Chika
    The study identified and categorised the frames in the epidemic disease reports and analysed the ideologies underlying the identified frames in the reports. It also examined the discursive and linguistic resources functioning as framing devices in the reports, and related the discursive framings and the linguistic devices to the stances of the news actors. These were done with a view to investigating how diseases, disease-informed concerns and news actors are discursively framed in the news. The study employed both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source comprised 72 news reports on four selected epidemic diseases from three online news categories, namely: online mainstream dailies, citizen journalism websites and biomedicine/health websites. Two news sources were selected in each online news category, based on their virtual ubiquity and credibility. They are: The Guardian and The Nation for online mainstream dailies, Sahara Reporters and Nairaland for citizen journalism websites, and Nigeria Health Watch and Health Reporters for biomedicine/health websites. Twelve disease stories were selected from each news source. Four diseases, namely Ebola, Lassa fever, Monkeypox and COVID-19, were selected based on the criterion that their outbreak covered three or more of the six geopolitical regions of Nigeria, which ascertained their topicality. The data spanned reports published between 2014 and 2020 in order to accommodate more recent records and discourse on the epidemic diseases. The secondary source included books, journal articles and the Internet. The theoretical frameworks for the data analysis were Dietram Scheufele’s Process Model of Framing, Teun van Dijk’s Socio-cognitive Model and Theo van Leeuwen’s Discursive Construction of Legitimization. The results showed that there are 13 frame categories in the reports, such as outbreak/spread awareness, local efforts toward interventions, causes, transmission and containment awarenessice and advocacy, risk and fear, incapability, insensitivity and incompetency, and effect of outbreaks. The study found that out of these 13 frame categories, outbreak/spread awareness and local efforts toward interventions are more prominent than others because they resonate respectively with the media’s primary interest in publishing topical appalling incidents and their social responsibility. It also uncovered that ideologies such as welfarism, resistance ideology, anti-religious ideology, contestation of knowledge formations, saviour complex and strike actions underlie the frames and polarise the disease discourses. The study further showed that the discursive resources such as history as lesson, number games, evidentiality, interdiscursive and intertextual references, actor description, discourse representations of diseases and actors, rhetoric of promises and assurances, verbal confrontation and vagueness serve as bedrocks of discursivity in frame construction, while linguistic resources such as lexicalisation and collocations, deictic pronominals, direct and reported expressions, disease schemata and passivisation enhance the framing practices. It also found that discursive framings and the linguistic resources share close interdependent relationships with the stances of the news actors as linguistic devices inherent in the frames also facilitate the actors’ stance legitimisation when they (actors) project ideologies behind the frames. The study concluded that the frames and their associated ideological underpinnings are arguably positioned to have a common impact on audience’s personal cognitive behaviour, their decisions toward social safety as well as on the mediation of disease outbreaks. It also concluded that there is an alignment of language and discursivity in shaping how concerns emanating from public health discourses are framed in news. Name of Supervisor: Prof. O. O. Taiwo Number of Pages: 256