“Government has good plans for you, but you would not co-operate”: Discursive Frames of Representing News Participants in Niger Delta Conflict Discourse

Linguistic studies on media representation of ND conflicts have utilised pragmatic, discourse analytical, and stylistic tools in exploring the contexts of participants’ engagement in the discourse, and the ideology and stylistics of media reporting; but little is known about how media framing is employed in representing participants. The paper examines the discursive frames, linguistic forms, and ideologies that mark the Nigerian media’s representation of the major participants engaged in the conflict. The Federal Government (FGN) group (including its Joint Task Force) and the ND militia group (with its sympathisers). Forty newspaper reports on ND conflicts (20 from two national newspapers (The Guardian and THISDAY) and 20 from two ND-based newspapers (The Tide and Pioneer), published between 2003 and 2011, were purposively sampled and subjected to content analysis, with insights from van Dijk’s model of ideological representation, Goffman’s frame analysis, and aspects of functional grammar discourse. Two media frames are constructed to represent the participants in the discourse: the FGN group has good intentions for the ND region, and the ND group should cooperate with the FGN group. These frames relate to specific media ideologies employed in representing the news participants’ qualities and roles in the conflict. The qualities are framed through evaluative nominal items, while the activities are framed by attributing agency and causality to participants’ actions through the clause information structure. The findings have demonstrated how media framing of ND news participants’ qualities and activities can shape readers’ interpretation of the conflict news events.