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

This study investigates the way news writers in selected Nigerian newspapersemployed language to express their underlying interests in the Freedom ofInformation (FOI) bill which engaged Nigerians’ attention from 1999 to2011. For the bill’s social relevance, the media and other pressure groupsdemanded that it should be signed into an Act by the Federal Governmentbut the Government refused because it perceived information as a meansof power control. Nigerians canvassed for the bill’s approval in order to beempowered to ask questions about the way they were governed, while theFederal Government believed that the Act would make journalists haveunhindered access to information which they might deploy indiscriminatelyin exposing perceived corrupt practices in the country. Data for the workwere derived from The Punch and The Guardian newspapers which widelypublished reports on the Bill between 2007 and 2008 and Critical DiscourseAnalysis (CDA) was engaged as the theoretical framework because of itspotential to reveal the news writers’ ideological positions on the bill. Analysisshowed that framing, idioms, rhetoric, referencing and words and expressionsof anger, doubt and rejection were among the linguistic strategies deployedin the news writers’ reports to help accelerate the bill’s approval.