Role Allocation in the Media Representation of Participants in Selected Electoral Discourses in Nigeria

Extant literature on media reports in Nigeria have considered different national issues including electoral matters. Few of such studies that considered electoral matters did not emphasize the distribution of roles in the reports. Guided by aspects of Theo van Leeuwen?s inventory on the representation of social actors (with emphasis on the account of role allocation), and aspects of the M.A.K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (with emphasis on the transitivity system), this study explores the semantic roles allocated to different participants within a sentence. The study examines how social actors, implicated in electoral discourse in Nigeria, are allocated specific roles in the news reports of two widely read news magazines, Tell and The News. Having examined the assignment of roles to social actors associated with the 2003 and 2007 electoral discourses, the findings reveal a systematic ideological bias in giving roles to participants or social actors. While activation is used as a strategy for revealing agency in news reports, passivation is used as a strategy of agency obscuration.