Critical Discourse Analysis of The Punch and The Guardian Newspaper Reports on the FOI Bill

Abstract

This study investigates the way news writers in selected Nigerian newspapers
employed language to express their underlying interests in the Freedom of
Information (FOI) bill which engaged Nigerians’ attention from 1999 to
2011. For the bill’s social relevance, the media and other pressure groups
demanded that it should be signed into an Act by the Federal Government
but the Government refused because it perceived information as a means
of power control. Nigerians canvassed for the bill’s approval in order to be
empowered to ask questions about the way they were governed, while the
Federal Government believed that the Act would make journalists have
unhindered access to information which they might deploy indiscriminately
in exposing perceived corrupt practices in the country. Data for the work
were derived from The Punch and The Guardian newspapers which widely
published reports on the Bill between 2007 and 2008 and Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) was engaged as the theoretical framework because of its
potential to reveal the news writers’ ideological positions on the bill. Analysis
showed that framing, idioms, rhetoric, referencing and words and expressions
of anger, doubt and rejection were among the linguistic strategies deployed
in the news writers’ reports to help accelerate the bill’s approval.