The Print Media's Use of Language to Cover Post-Election Violence: A Comparative Study of Two Kenyan Diary
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Date
2013-04-19
Authors
Mwembi, Joseph Magena
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Abstract
This report presents a contrastive text-linguistic study of rhetorical differences between
texts written by the 'journalese' of different cultural practices, but using as means of
expression the same language: English. This was by describing the linguistic features of
headlines used by the Daily Nation and The Standard to cover PEV as well as the
linguistic feature similarities and differences in the news texts. The study also shows the
discourse function of the linguistic features used by the two dailies to cover PEY. A
descriptive research design is adopted for this study. Six news reports were purposively
sampled for analysis. Only those articles of more than 350 words, authored by either the
Nation or Standard team respectively and covering the same topical issue (post 2007-
Election Violence) were considered. The study adopts an eclectic theoretical framework
in which the genre theory, systemic functional grammar model, appraisal theory and
Biber's (1988) model informed data analysis. Data was then discussed and the results
presented through frequency tables. Generalizations and conclusions were made based on
the findings of the study. This was an attempt aimed at contributing to research in Genre
Analysis. It has emerged that expressions that imply and visualize violence characterized
the writing of headlines making readers to visualize a grim picture of the PEV
experience. Again, both dailies preferred the use of the past tense to indicate something
of just how basic narration of past actions and events like PEV are in the news beats.
Also, private verbs were never employed by the Daily Nation probably to distance the
writers from expressing private thoughts, attitudes and emotions to their audience. On the
other hand, The Standard employed private verbs probably to express private thoughts,
attitudes and emotions to their audience. Finally, the choice between the active or passive
voice emphasizes, minimizes or entirely omits the role of the participant in a sentence
depending on how blame or credit is to be distributed among them. The study
recommends that. genre-based teaching approach be adopted to instruct journalists by
developing materials tailored on such an approach. This will go a long way in grounding
the learner in the news writing community. This seems to agree with Kay and Dudley-
Evans' (1998:310) assertion that a genre-based approach will enable the learner to enter a
particular discourse community, and discover how writers organize texts.