A Critical Discourse Analysis of Power and Identity in Nigerian Television News Language

Critical discourse analysis of television news language reveals the ideological dimensions of seemingly neutral journalistic communication, and the specific power and identity dynamics encoded in Nigerian television news discourse have not been subjected to comprehensive systematic analysis using contemporary CDA methodologies. This study conducted a critical discourse analysis of power and identity in Nigerian television news language. A multi-dimensional CDA methodology integrating van Dijk's sociocognitive CDA, Fairclough's dialectical-relational approach, and Wodak's discourse-historical method was employed, adapted for the multilingual and multi-ethnic Nigerian television news context. A corpus of 240 television news programmes from four national networks (NTA, Channels TV, TVC, AIT) across a 12-month period was assembled, supplemented by 18 months of participant observation in two newsrooms and 32 interviews with journalists and editors. Discourse analysis examined lexical choices for ethnic and religious group references, presupposition patterns in security coverage, nominalisations obscuring agency in economic reporting, and pronoun politics in political discourse. Results revealed systematic patterns of positive self-representation and negative other-representation along ethnic and political lines. Lexical choices for different political actors encoded approval-disapproval distinctions that correlated with ownership affiliations in 68 percent of analysed news items. Security coverage consistently nominalised government actions while agent-attributing insurgent violence, producing asymmetric agency distribution. Original theoretical contributions include the Nigerian News Discourse Power Matrix, mapping the six primary power relations encoded in television news language, and the Ethnic Ideological Lexical Field concept, identifying systematically distributed vocabulary differences for ethnically-coded news subjects.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, television news, power and identity, Nigerian media language, discourse theory