Media Perspectives on Boko Haram Insurgency and Herdsmen- Farmers’ Crises in Nigeria.

An Analysis of Transitivity in Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

The focus of the study is media perspectives on Boko Haram insurgency and herdsmen-farmers clashes in Nigeria. These security issues have been commented on, in Nigerian newspapers. In order to show the social attitudes of different news organisations in Nigeria to the operations of Boko Haram insurgents and nomadic herdsmen, the study analysed news editorials from The Punch and The Guardian (South-Western region), Vanguard and The Sun (East) andLeadership and Daily Trust (Northern Region). The editorials were those published in the heatof the conflicts between 2014 and 2016. The analysis focused on the representations of Agents and activities and media’s perspectives on both security issues through the analysis of process options. Our findings show that all the newspapers syntactically positioned the Boko Haram insurgents and cattle herders as Agents of destruction and death and syntactically portrayed Nigerians and farmers as the victims /affecteds of these security issues. The process options show that the newspapers did not, in any way, try to obscure the activities of these groups, rather, they decry such.