Citation: Abah, T.M., Joseph, G.J. & Nhlanhla, L. (2026). Representation of Nigerian Air Traffic Accident Victims in International Newspaper Discourses. Tasambo Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture, 5(1), 88-98. www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2026.v05i01.010.
REPRESENTATION OF NIGERIAN AIR TRAFFIC ACCIDENT VICTIMS IN INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPER DISCOURSES
Dr Thomas Michael Abah
Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria
abahthomas68@yahoo.com
+2347034675555
And
Dr Gbenga Julius Joseph
Department of Languages and Communication, University of Fort Hare, South Africa
gjoseph@ufh.ac.za
+27635416710
And
Dr Landa Nhlanhla
Department of Languages and Communication, University of Fort Hare, South Africa
nlanda@ufh.ac.za
+27835841854
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
Introduction
Reporting misfortunes has been a major preoccupation of the news media, not only in Nigeria but also across the world. Radio, television and newspaper houses are always awash with news about one disaster or another. The main purpose is usually to provide news readers or listeners with first-hand information on events, such as the likely cause of the accident, place of the disaster, the magnitude of the disaster, casualty figures, ongoing rescue efforts by governments, groups and individuals. Responsible journalism ought to empathise with the victims, their family members and friends rather than represent them in ways that do not mitigate the trauma resulting from the unfortunate experience. Whether dead or alive, they have a right to the freedom of their personal dignity, and the media owes them the duty of responsible representation like other human beings. It is hypothesised in this paper that the manner in which many mishaps are reported across the world is frequently disproportionate or lacks balance.
Although accidents of various kinds and magnitudes have been part of people’s daily experiences in Nigeria and other places, research inquiries into media habits of reporting accidents have not attracted sufficient scholarly attention. Existing literature indicates that the media's focus on accidents has been on auto-safety and accidents, accident prevalence during peak periods, causes and prevention of accidents and effects of crime rate on road accidents. Critical investigations are needed to interrogate what news producers write about people who were only unfortunate to have been victims of an accident and investigate how consumers of news might want to interpret such representations. Thus, this study investigates the representation of victims in media discourses on air accidents in Nigeria. This paper aims to study habits of constructing victims in newspaper discourses on air accidents in Nigeria. However, the specific objectives of the study are:
- to investigate the representational strategies used to construct the victims in the media discourses on the air accidents in Nigeria.
- to explain the social values of the representational strategies in the discourses in relation to the identity of the victims
Crisis Communication
The conceptual basis of this research paper is crisis communication. Crisis communication pertains to the effective management of information during emergencies such as armed conflicts, epidemics and/or pandemics, transportation mishaps, domestic and industrial accidents, fire outbreaks, and natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and tropical storms (Levine, 1989; Krivonos, 2007). In all of these, communication management may be with regard to precautionary and safety measures, search and rescue of victims, evacuation, graphic description of incidents, and the like.
An accident is also a type of crisis, which has been defined by Safe Work Australia (2018) as an unplanned occurrence or incident that causes or contributes to personal injury or property damage. Laakso (2011) categorises accidents into minor and major ones and explains that major accidents usually bring together different shades of individuals, groups, and cultures who may differ considerably in their attitude to communication during emergencies, hence the need for much more research attention to how accidents are communicated.
As Seixas (2021) explains, the goals of crisis communication, apart from limiting reputational damage, also include the reduction of harms, re-establishing public order, and protecting the public. In a similar vein, Seeger (2006) lists some crisis communication strategies to include, among others, honesty, candour and openness, communicating with compassion, concern, and empathy, and accepting uncertainty and ambiguity. Coombs (2007) also points out that the management of crisis has ethical dimensions, which principally involve using communication to address the physical and psychological concerns of the victims.
In the communication of crises or disasters, three sets of relationships are always present. These are communication among local organisations addressing emergencies, communication between local organisations and expert organisations from outside the local community, and communication between the organisations and the general public (Levine, 1989). Krivonos (2007) advocates prudent communication dissemination during crisis moments and explains that effective handling and processing of information during a crisis could go a long way in minimising risks, especially if there is communication awareness that is integrated into people’s thinking and if it is applied and used proactively.
Communication, as important as it is, especially in emergencies, is not without its own challenges. Pfeiffer (1998) observes that the desire to pass across information is often hindered by a number of factors, among which are hidden agendas, status, and stereotyping. Therefore, in this awareness, there is a need to guard against all these, since the basic facts of an event may be open to different interpretations, which could make an organisation’s message difficult to be accepted by the intended audience. Crisis communication, therefore, is a suitable concept for this paper, which investigates newspaper reportage on air and road accidents in Nigeria. It subscribes to Pfeiffer (1998) that other considerations are sometimes allowed to stand in the way of effective communication and which always show starkly whenever messages are subjected to critical evaluation. Specifically, this paper investigates how some of the above-listed factors have been used by the media to present information on the two types of accidents.
Literature Review
Peter and George (1997), in a study on The Ideology of Auto Safety, note that discourses about traffic accidents are limited by an ideology of automobility that has accompanied increased auto dependence and the hegemony of the automobile over social space. While admitting that human error and technical improvement are often identified in risk analyses, they also point out systemic factors that have remained largely ignored. They argue in the study that, since auto-centred transport depends upon the constant sobriety of all traffic participants, impaired driving, walking, and cycling are inevitable. They conclude that the lack of attention to systemic factors in safety discourses is congruent with the general culture of individual automobility, which assumes the superiority of auto-centred transport over other, more diversified structures of movement.
Seedat and MacRitchie (2008) used discourse analysis to examine the dominant and non-dominant ways through which South African print media constructed traffic accidents during peak holiday periods, as well as to explore the insinuations and implications evoked by newspaper headlines and texts on traffic-related accidents. They found in the papers that the Easter and festive season road environment is constructed as a “war zone,” in which different road users are locked in carnage and the torment of death. They also found that, to engender support for certain hegemonic opinions and actions, the discourses of war as carried in the headlines produce victims, villains, protectors, and rescuers, while taxi drivers are the regular perpetrators of the war.
Many scholarly articles on accident-related discourses pertaining to Nigeria appear to focus more on cases, causes, and preventive measures. For example, Onyemechi and Ofoma (2016) reviewed a web-based data search that focused on the public health threat of road traffic accidents in Nigeria. They used search engines such as PubMed, Scopus, Embase, Google, and the Directory of Open Access Journals. Only studies published in English before the time of the search in September 2014 were included in the study. The search retrieved 850 results, and data from these studies were extracted and assessed for inclusion using clinical and epidemiological studies on road traffic accidents. They found that there is an increasing burden of road traffic accidents and injury-related deaths globally, with Nigeria having one of the highest rates of road traffic fatalities in the world, and concluded that the response of the government in controlling the scourge has been inadequate.
Oluwaseyi and Gbadamosi (2017) examined road traffic accident problems in Nigeria. In the article, they discuss the causes and general preventive measures. They conclude by recommending urgent government action to prevent untimely death and reduce the health, social, and economic impacts it portends for the average Nigerian. Ajide (2020) examines the effect of crime rate on road accidents in Nigeria between 1986 and 2016. Using what he calls ARDL techniques, he documents that criminal activities have a positive and significant effect on road crashes in Nigeria. He explains that the results also persist when the study introduced other co-integrating regression techniques such as FMOLS, DOLS, and CCR, which also showed that crime is one of the leading factors causing road crashes in Nigeria.
The review has shown that scholarly investigations on accidents in Nigeria are not completely lacking in the literature. It has also revealed similarities between previous studies and the present investigation. For instance, both share the same thematic concern, which borders on accidents. Previous studies also used newspaper corpora as their sources of data and analysed such data using discursive frameworks. However, the review has revealed a number of differences between previous studies and the present study. For instance, the literature indicates that there have been no scholarly studies yet on air accidents. Secondly, previous studies on accident reportage did not use any critical discourse analytical framework to carry out their investigations. For deeper analysis and understanding in this area, critical models are needed to strengthen investigation processes. These are important knowledge gaps that need to be filled; hence, this study investigates how victims of air accidents in Nigeria have been represented in media discourses.
Theoretical Framework and Analytical Model
The critical approach to media discourse analysis is a theoretical child of the broader critical discourse analysis (CDA); CDA itself was founded in the 1960s and 1970s by Hallidayan linguists at the University of East Anglia, such as Roger Fowler, Gunther Kress, Van Dijk, and Norman Fairclough. The approach is essentially about the production and consumption of news; it views the use of language in the press as a social process and shows interest in how the news text is positioned, whose interests it is meant to serve, whose interests are negated, and the consequences of the positioning (Fairclough, 1995).
Critical news analysis engages primarily with the role of linguistic structure in news reports. It is about how language is used in newspapers to express ideas and beliefs. News, according to Fowler (1991), is worth studying since the use of language in news practice imposes a structure of social and economic values on whatever is represented. He assumes that the words and syntax found in newspaper texts are purposeful. Therefore, he describes language as frequently a non-transparent mediator, or a semiotic code, that is not always a clear window but a refracting structuring medium. Thus, CNA sets out to describe the nature of news and analyse news content using critical linguistic tools.
The theoretical model adopted for analysis in this study is Fowler’s idea of news as a construction. Fowler (1991, pp. 10–13) declares that “the institutions of news reporting and presentation are socially, economically and politically situated” and asserts that the production of news, especially through the medium of newspapers, follows a process that is already biased. For instance, he maintains that selecting an item to be included as news is normally based on a criterion of “newsworthiness” or “news values.” According to him, this very first step in the process makes one understand immediately that “news is not simply what happens but that which can be regarded and presented as newsworthy. The process of selection gives us a partial view of the world,” and makes him conclude that the world of the press is one already “skewed and judged.” The items selected are further subjected to a process of transformation before they are published. Therefore, he points out that the process of news-making reduces news content to “ideas” that usually do not reflect the intrinsic importance of those events (Fowler, 1991, pp. 13–17). This means that media news representation is always from a particular point of view.
Fowler (1991, p. 222) declares that news is not a natural phenomenon coming straight from reality but a “product.” As a product, it can be made into different shapes depending on the taste of the producer. News, according to Fowler, is indeed a product because “it is produced by an industry, shaped by the bureaucratic and economic structure of that industry, by the relations between the media and other industries…” It is also seen as a representation and a practice. As a representation, it passes through language, which is the semiotic code that is not a clear window but a refracting structuring medium; in other words, it is already constrained to agree with a structure of social and economic values about whatever is represented. As discourse, and like every other discourse, “it is not a value-free reflection of ‘facts’ as each linguistic expression in a text is used purposively” (p. 4). Finally, as a practice, “news is not ‘found’ or even ‘gathered’ so much as made.” This also means that news is a discourse that does not reflect empirical facts and social reality but the construction of social reality.
Social practices in newspaper discourse, according to Fowler (1991), are realized using a number of strategies. He highlights some of the strategies to include, but not be limited to, categorization, personalization, stereotyping, generalization, and particularization, as well as through the linguistic processes of transitivity, clause transformation, lexicalization, and re-lexicalization. Some of these strategies have been adopted here to find out how air accident victims are usually constructed in newspaper reports.
Methodology
This empirical study used qualitative-descriptive analyses to find out how air accident victims have been constructed in international print media. The data for the study were collected from five newspaper reports on air accidents in Nigeria. The newspapers purposively selected for reading were Reuters, BBC News, Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Telegraph, and the air accident reports identified in the papers for study were the Hercules C-13 air crash of 1992, the Bellview accident of 2005, the Sosoliso air crash of 2005, the ADC crash of 2006, and the Dana air disaster of 2012.
To collect the data for the study, online reports on each accident were accessed and downloaded. The stories were then carefully read, and areas relevant to the data needs of the study were written down as excerpts. A total of five purposively selected excerpts were used for the analysis in this study.
Data Presentation
Excerpt 1:
163 Nigerians dead as a military plane crashes near Lagos. Many of those killed…were believed to be middle-ranking army, navy and air force officers attending a staff college course in northern Nigeria. Officials said many of the dead were believed to have been officers taking a course at the Nigerian Command and Staff College. Some of them were instructors. NTA confirmed that air force personnel were on the plane. This has taken a big lump out of the middle of the armed forces. (Hercules C-13 crash, Reuters, 28/9/1992).
Excerpt 2:
All 117 passengers and crew of a commercial airliner which crashed on an internal flight in Nigeria on Saturday were killed. Senior officials, including an MP and a general were said to be on the flight. Friends of the 111 passengers and six crew have besieged the domestic terminal of Lagos airport. (Bellview air crash, BBC News, 23/10/2005).
Excerpt 3:
Families identify young victims of Nigerian crash. Grieving relatives of the 107 victims of a weekend jetliner crash struggled Monday to identify the bodies of loved ones, most of them school children. They tried to find out what caused Saturday’s crash of a Sosoliso Airlines DC-9 ferrying dozens of children home from a Jesuit boarding school. The three survivors are being treated for severe burns. The plane’s passengers included 71 teenagers from the Ignatius Loyola Jesuit College. One survivor, a doctor named Priscilla, lay swaddled in bandages. The other survivors have burns over as much as 40 percent of their bodies. (Sosoliso, Associated Press, 14/12/2005).
Excerpt 4:
A Nigerian airliner carrying 104 people, including the man regarded as the spiritual leader of Nigeria’s Sunni Muslims, crashed in a storm Sunday…. At least six people survived. The Sunni leader was among those killed in the crash. The Sokoto State Government said that the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Maccido, had died in the crash. Maccido was the head of the National Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs which determines when Muslims fast should begin and end, and decides policy issues for Nigeria’s Sunn Muslims. Spokesman for the Sokoto State Government said that the Sultan’s son, Mohammed Maccido, a senator, along with Abdulrahman Shehu Shagari, son of a former Nigerian president Shehu Shagari, who was in office between 1979 and 1983. About half of Nigeria’s 130 million people are Muslims. (ADC crash, The New York Times, 29/10/2006).
Excerpt 5:
Nigeria has begun recovering bodies from the site of a plane crash where at least 150 people were killed. The number of those killed on ground remained unclear. Around 10 bodies were recovered from a collapsed building. Among those on board were said to be Ibrahim Shekarau, the former governor of the restive Kano State, Levi Ajuonuma, spokesman of NNPC, as well as some senior military officials, including three army generals. (Dana air crash, The Telegraph, 4/6/2012).
Analysis and Discussions
Social Construction of the Victims in the Newspaper Reports on Air Accidents in Nigeria
The investigation from excerpt 1 reveals an extensive use of representational strategies, such as categorization, personalization, generalization, over-lexicalization, and repetition, with varying degrees of social values. To start with, categorization, or “linguistic objectification,” as so called by Fowler (1991, p. 58), is “the allocation of a definite place” in the process of representing groups or entities. He hints that “group” is an instrument for sorting “unequally” in discourses, which he also describes as “discriminating grids” (p. 94). Van Dijk (2016) notes that real social and political events are the same things that are always reproduced in discourses where there are social constructions of the discourse participants. Categorization creates social groups and puts people in them. For example, the air accident involving the Hercules C-13 in excerpt 1, as reported by Reuters in 1992, claimed 163 lives, but there are category labels in the news reports such as “military officers” and “instructors.” Those in the group of military officers are further represented as “army, navy and air force officers.” Thus, the victims are sorted according to the group to which they belong.
Available data in excerpt 2 also indicate sorting or categorization of the victims in the newspaper reports on other air disasters in Nigeria. Excerpt 2 is from BBC news reports on the Bellview air crash of 2005, which claimed 117 lives. In this report, the victims are categorized socially as “senior officials,” on the one hand, and “crew members,” on the other. The category of “senior officials” is reported as comprising “a Nigerian member of parliament” and “an army general,” while the “crew members” were said to be six in number, which would mean two categories for eight of the victims. The other victims of the crash, numbering 109, belong to an “unannounced” category. Grouping as a representational strategy is also utilised in the newspaper report following the Sosoliso air disaster of 2005, which was reported to have claimed 107 lives in excerpt 3. Similarly, the news report by the Associated Press, contained in excerpt 3, reveals that the two social categories are “school children” and “survivors.” The category of school children comprised 71 members, while that of survivors had only two. Thus, the other 24 victims are not given any category label.
Another strategy of constructing the air accident victims socially in the newspaper reports studied is the tendency to personalize some of the victims. Fowler (1991) describes personalization as a useful ideological tool that can be employed to promote identification, empathy, and disapproval. Van Dijk (2016) claims that social members represent both social structures as well as discourse structures in their minds. This manner of identification of some people is a purposeful construction by the discourse makers of the personality of the victims. Although particular names are not mentioned in the news report on the Bellview incident, the reference to senior officials as an “MP” and a “General” in the armed forces in excerpt 2 amounts to nomination and therefore an effort at drawing attention to the calibre of people killed in the crash. Personalization as a social strategy is also used copiously in The New York Times in excerpt 4 regarding the ill-fated ADC air disaster of 2006. The dead numbered 102; however, in the entire news report, three names are singled out or nominated among the total 102 victims: “Muhammadu Maccido,” “Mohammed Maccido,” and “Abdulrahman Shehu Shagari”; the other 99 victims are backgrounded in the news description. As in the other news reports, nothing is said about the identity of the survivors. In the Dana crash in excerpt 5, though 150 people were believed to have lost their lives, there is personalization of “Ibrahim Shekarau” and “Levi Ajuonuma,” a former Nigerian governor and the spokesperson of Nigeria’s NNPC, respectively. Furthermore, an occupational label is also deployed to strengthen the personalizing strategy in the news reports. Fowler (1991) stresses that in the English language, different styles of naming are associated with different social values; hence, for the Associated Press, the mention of “Priscilla” (a survivor) is not seen as enough or complete until her occupational label as “a doctor” is added to the narrative.
Categorization and personalization are not the only representational strategies in the discourses; some of the air accident victims in the newspaper discourses are generalized as well. Fowler (1991) describes generalization in terms of “formular,” which is a process of treating entities as a class, especially where little social importance is attached to the group, and according to Leeuwen (2008, p. 69), generalizations “abstract away from the more specific micro-actions that make up the actions.” Generalization in the discourses may be said to have been caused by the attempt to categorize and particularize some participants. For instance, in the report by Reuters on the Hercules C-13 crash in excerpt 1, there is generalization of “military officers” and “instructors.” Similarly, in the BBC news report on the Bellview crash in excerpt 2, there is generalization in “senior officials” and “crew members,” while the Associated Press in excerpt 3 on the Sosoliso crash generalized “school children” and “survivors.”
Repetition forms part of the lexical structure of discourses on victims of air accidents, and it has also helped considerably in the social construction process. According to Fowler (1991, p. 84), lexis is an important tool in the discourse construction process and an aspect of the reproduction of ideology in newspapers. He explains that discourse allows the categorized words to be spoken and written frequently, which gives them value weight. Hence, he sees it also as the basis of discriminatory practices when dealing with different groups of people. In excerpt 3, lexical items that are related are habitually mentioned or repeated by the Associated Press in the text. Thus, words such as “teenagers,” “young victims,” “school children,” “dozens of children,” and so forth are common in the text. There are two references as well to the institutional affiliation of the dead children, such as “Jesuit boarding school” and “Ignatius Loyola Jesuit College.” These lexical items are not only mentioned more habitually than others in the discourse but also form a cluster of related terms. For example, “teenagers,” “young victims,” “school children,” and “dozens of children” are a cluster under the generic lexical term “young people.”
The New York Times extensively used the lexical process of over-lexicalization to discuss “Muhammadu Maccido” in its report on the ADC crash in excerpt 4. Trew (2019, p. 144) describes over-lexicalization as “the proliferation of terms focusing on the one group of participants.” Frequently occurring and related words are used to describe one person in the text, some of which include “the man regarded as the spiritual leader of Nigeria’s Sunni Muslims,” “the Sunni leader,” “the Sultan,” “the Sultan of Sokoto,” “Muhammadu Maccido,” and “the head of the National Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs,” and so forth. In the same news report, religious words are mentioned very frequently. The plane, no doubt, had people of other faiths on board, but words such as “Nigeria’s Sunni Muslims,” “Sunni Muslims,” and “Muslims” dominate the report. Other over-lexicalised, related, and habitually occurring terms in the news reports on the Hercules C-13 crash by Reuters in excerpt 1 include “army officers,” “navy officers,” “air force officers,” “officers,” “air force personnel,” and “armed forces.” These terms are related by virtue of their being members of the armed forces.
Therefore, it is clear from the foregoing discussions that the makers of the discourses on the four air accidents under study in this paper exploited the representational strategies of categorization, personalization, generalization, repetition, and over-lexicalization to help in the construction of the victims in various ways. The social values of the construction are what will be explained in the next part of this paper.
Social Values of Representational Strategies in the Discourses
Categorization was identified as one of the discursive strategies used to construct victims of the air accidents under investigation in the discourses. Fowler (1991, p. 58) describes categorization, which he also so-calls “linguistic objectification,” as the representational strategy by which a definite place is allocated in discourse and describes it as a cardinal aspect of the reproduction of ideology and the basis of discriminatory practices in discourse. According to him, once people are sorted into groups and are provided names, the next thing will be to show favourable or disfavourable attitudes towards them. This strategy largely accounts for the kind of social prejudices in these discourses, where some categories are preferred to others. For instance, the discursive attention of Reuters in excerpt 1 is more on the category of “military officers” than those referred to as “instructors” in the discourse. One is hardly surprised at this level of media interest, given that in Nigeria, enlistment into the officer cadre of the armed forces is subject to power influence. The BBC in excerpt 2 is also more concerned about the loss of several “senior officials” in the Bellview crash, but is almost silent about the “crew” on board the plane. Similarly, the Associated Press’ report on the Sosoliso disaster focuses more on the discourse category of 71 school children, while the only two survivors are denied enough media coverage. The separation of the victims into categories is on account of their social standing in society, and this made the discourse discriminate against some victims of the accidents. Thus, there is unequal provision of attention and the bestowing of social esteem with regard to the victims in the discourses.
Fowler (1991) mentions personalization or particularization as an important tendency in media reportage and notes that happenings involving some individuals have a high chance of becoming news stories. Personalization is an obsession with individuals in discourses, and in this representational process, labels are attached to individuals. According to Fowler, personalization is often used for associations and dissociations, or as a way of drawing extra attention to the person, for good or bad; hence, he describes the process of individualisation as “the surface-structure manifestation of underlying abstract paradigms” of a discourse. In the New York Times report on the ADC crash (excerpt 4), a total of 102 passengers lost their lives, but the news report personalised “Muhammadu Maccido,” “Mohammed Maccido,” and “Abdulrahman Shehu Shagari”; the other 99 victims are backgrounded. In the Sosoliso crash (excerpt 3), the Associated Press made mention of one “Priscilla,” said to be a “medical doctor,” just as reports on the Dana crash (excerpt 5) by The Telegraph mentioned “Ibrahim Shekarau” and “Levi Ajuonumaa” as being among the victims. According to Fowler, when particular names are singled out as examples, the things we see and think about them are reduced to schemes of values. In this regard, personalization in this discourse functions to let readers have the awareness that the nominated victims of the disasters are individuals of high social standing, or that some persons are “more equal than others.”
Social significance is also underscored in the use of general terms to represent victims in the discourses. Formulae are used to describe entities, especially if there is little social regard for the group. That is why the reports by Reuters on the Hercule-13 disaster in excerpt 1 generalised some victims as “instructors”; the instructors, who are underdogs in this discourse, were actually the ones charged with the responsibility of training the military officers who received more prominence in the story. The BBC also generalised the staff members who were in charge of the Bellview flight (excerpt 2) as “crew members” without identification, in the same manner that the Associated Press (excerpt 3) constructed some victims of the Sosoliso disaster socially as “survivors.” These markers are socially significant, as they provide readers with clues about the interest of the discourse producer. The general group in any discourse is a socially marginalized one. Therefore, the use of formulae in the discourse is a purposeful construction to background or suppress some of the victims on account of their social identity.
The lexical strategies of repetition of words and other syntactic forms, on the one hand, and over-lexicalization, on the other, as used in these discourses, are both exploited to achieve similar social purposes. Repetition is the process whereby linguistic forms are mentioned oftentimes to foreground an aspect of the discourse, while over-lexicalization, from the point of view of Trew (2019), causes terms focusing on one group of participants to proliferate; Fowler and Kress (2019, pp. 211–212) describe the discursive practice as “the provision of a large number of synonymous or near-synonymous terms for communication of some specialized area of experience.” The reports by the Associated Press on the Sosoliso plane crash (excerpt 3) contain repeated forms such as “teenagers,” “young victims,” “school children,” and “dozens of children.” There are two references as well to the institutional affiliation of the dead children, such as “Jesuit boarding school” and “Ignatius Loyola Jesuit College.” The emphasis on the 71 secondary school children who perished in the disaster is not necessarily for their academic exploits; at least they were not the brightest of Nigerian students. It is because of their rich social background. Aspects of the news texts on the ADC crash by The New York Times (excerpt 4) are also repeated and/or over-lexicalised; repetition, in this case, could be noticed in “Nigeria’s Sunni Muslims,” “Muslims,” and “Sunni Muslims.” The discourse is calculated at foregrounding something about a particular faith. Over-lexicalization may also be seen in the use of near-synonymous structures to describe one of the victims and a late Sultan of Sokoto, with phrases such as “the man regarded as the spiritual leader of Nigeria’s Sunni Muslims,” “the Sunni leader,” “the Sultan of Sokoto,” “Muhammadu Maccido,” and “the head of the National Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs,” suggesting that Maccido was just more than that name. All these go a long way to corroborate the claim by Fowler (1991, p. 98) that “discourse distinguishes the powerful from the disfavoured.”
In summary, the deployment of five representational strategies (categorization, personalization, generalization, repetition, and over-lexicalization) in the media discourses about the victims of the air mishaps is socially significant; their presence, as hinted by Fowler and Kress (2019), points to the social values of the group that generates them. Moreover, all the strategies display underlying social prejudices on the part of the discourse producers. As hinted by Muecke (1992), the same individuals in positions of power, including media workers and owners, set the parameters and manage the markers of difference in discourses.
Conclusion
This study shows that the way air accident victims are represented in Nigerian newspapers is not neutral. It is shaped by social, institutional, and media biases. Through techniques such as categorization, personalization, generalization, repetition, and over-lexicalization, newspapers tend to highlight certain victims, often those with higher social status, while downplaying or generalizing others. These choices reflect deeper social hierarchies and values, revealing that news is not simply a mirror of reality but a product shaped by economic, political, and ideological forces. Language, as the medium of news, plays a central role in this process, structuring meaning in ways that privilege some groups and marginalize others.
The study emphasizes the ethical responsibilities of journalists and the broader social impact of news representation by applying a critical news analysis framework to coverage of Nigerian air accidents. It also fills a gap in research by focusing on air accidents, a topic that has received little attention in Nigerian media studies, and shows how critical discourse analysis can uncover the power dynamics embedded in news texts. Ultimately, the way victims are portrayed does more than describe events; it shapes public perception, influences how society understands disasters, and affects the recognition of the human experiences behind these tragedies.
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