Abstract:
Discourses on accidents in Nigeria have appeared in many scholarly investigations. However, these have focused mainly on accident prevalence, causes, and preventive strategies. Adequate scholarly attention on the manner in which the print media have always reported accidents, especially regarding media representation of air accident victims in Nigeria, is still lacking. Thus, this paper investigated the way in which the media in Nigeria have reported air accidents. The study sought to find out the discursive strategies used for constructing the victims and to explain the social values of such strategies in the news reports. The qualitative-descriptive study of Roger Fowler’s model of the critical news analytical framework is adopted to discuss the data. Data for the study were collected from five online international newspapers’ corpora on five high-profile air accidents in Nigeria. These international newspapers are Reuters, BBC News, Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Telegraph. Investigations from the corpora reveal extensive use of different strategies of representation in the discourses, such as categorization, personalization, generalization, repetition, and over-lexicalization. In addition, it also showed that the use of strategies has varying degrees of social value. Therefore, the study concludes that the discourses on the victims of air mishaps are socially situated to construct the social identity of the victims and their circumstantial description by the news reportage.
Keywords: Air travel accident, victims of accident, media reportage
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2026.v05i01.010
author/Abah, T.M., Joseph, G.J. & Nhlanhla, L.
journal/Tasambo JLLC 5(1) | February 2026 |
