Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The agitation for the sovereign state of Biafra, mainly domiciled in the eastern part of Nigeria, has attracted reactions from different quarters, including local and international mass media. The agitation emerged in 1967, subsided in 1970, and was reawakened in 2015. The government has made arrests, declared a state of emergency, and declared a curfew in some sections of the region. The activities of the agitators, coupled with the hype by the traditional and social media, have given the incident an unprecedented publicity. Existing studies on media representation have examined different agitations, including militancy in the Niger Delta. Nevertheless, studies have not explored the recent agitation for the sovereign state of Biafra, especially as led by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) because it is a recent development. Hence, there is a need to give a full description to the language of media discourse, especially in relation to the culture-based language forms deployed by the Nigerian newspapers. This study, therefore, applies a critical discourse approach to examine the discourse strategies deployed by selected newspapers in representing the news reports on Biafran agitators, with a view to establishing the implications of the use of language in the news reports. It deploys a total of fifty purposively selected reports, which comprised about 250,000-word corpus, from the 2015 and 2017 online versions of three newspapers from the northern (Daily Trust), western (The Nation) and eastern (The Sun) parts of Nigeria.