Style and Ideology of Mediation in Conflict News Reporting: The Case of Nigerian Newspaper Reports on Niger Delta Conflicts

Media studies on Niger Delta (Henceforth, ND) conflicts have observed a link between the way information on the conflict is presented and the impression created on the participants in the conflict discourse. This paper investigates how stylistic forms are utilised by Nigerian media for ideological mediation while conveying information on the conflict news. Forty reports published between 2003 and 2009 were purposively selected from eight Nigerian newspapers, four national (Vanguard, The Guardian, The Punch, and THISDAY), and four regional (The Tide, The Pointer, New Waves, and Pioneer) newspapers, and subjected to stylistic and critical analyses, with insights from critical stylistics and aspects of the functional approach to textual analysis. Ideological mediation is dominated by two media practices observed in the data, namely, the representation of news actors’ positions on issues in the news, and the representation of news participants’ conditions in the discourse. While the former is indexed by such stylistic choices as the use of the modality system and the concept of presupposition, the latter is marked by the use of equivalence devices, negated opposites and contrastives. These findings corroborate the relationship between the stylistic forms used in the reports and the ideological goal of the Nigerian media to mediate ND conflicts.