Abstract

This is a Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Malawian newspapers’ hard news on the coverage of ‘Budget vs. Section 65’ between 2006 and 2008. It was conceptualised when President Bingu wa Mutharika resigned from the United Democratic Front (UDF) to form the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2005 which caused 85 Members of Parliament (MPs) to cross the floor to the DPP despite Section 65 of the country’s Constitution barring them from doing so. This caused a political impasse during budget sessions as the ruling and opposition parties disagreed with the former stressing to discuss the budget only while the latter insisted on invoking Section 65 and then deliberating on the budget. This controversy, which Daily Times termed ‘Budget vs. Section 65’, was widely covered in the media. However, although newspaper discourse is intrinsically ideological, most readers regard it as a true reflection of the social events. Hence, there was a need to critically examine ideologies in ‘Budget vs. Section 65’ newspaper discourse. In this case, since previous studies on discourse and ideology have been criticized as being ‘logocentric’, this study adopted Faircloughian socio-semiotics and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual social semiotics. The data for the study came from headlines, leads and photographs of hard news from Daily Times (DT), Malawi News (MN), The Nation (NA) and Weekend Nation (WN) that are published by Blantyre Newspapers Limited (BNL) and Nation Publications Limited (NPL). A total of 156 articles were identified for a quantitative examination, 73 of which were purposively sampled for qualitative analysis. Through the analyses of the producers’ choice of lexis, referential strategies, metaphors, discourse representation, modality, thematic structure and non-linguistic features, the study found a binary representation of the ruling party and the budget on one hand, and the opposition parties and Section 65, on the other. Either due to their over-reliance on government advertising or an attempt to side with an audience which at the time was discontented with the UDF as a party, these privately owned newspapers represented the ruling party positively while members of the opposition parties were negatively represented despite their position being justified by the country’s Constitution. Hence, just like other critical studies on media discourse have demonstrated elsewhere, newspapers’ reporting on the controversy was far from objective.

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School	: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Issued Date	: 2016

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