A critical analysis of media discourse after a natural flooding disaster in Malawi, in 2015

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This is a multimodal critical discourse analysis study that investigates the media discursivestrategies in the representation of the catastrophic flooding disaster of January 2015 in Malawi.It analyses the representation of social actors in local print and international online websites,investigating which discursive strategies are typically used to present the selected content, andwhat the overt and covert meanings are that visual and linguistic texts puts out to their respectiveimplied audiences.The theoretical and analytical framework uses a combination of different approaches withinCDA, specifically Fairclough's (1992, 1995) dialectal relational approach, Kress and VanLeeuwen's (1996, 2006) Grammar of Visual Design, and Van Leeuwen's (2008) Social ActorModel. Using a multimodal approach, the study analyses articles purposively selected from adata corpus of 308 news articles that incorporated 313 news images gathered from two localMalawian print media, namely The Daily Times and The Nation, and two international onlinenews websites, The Guardian and Daily Mail Online.The methodology is predominantly qualitative although some elements of quantitativeparadigm were used to explain patterns, frequency and or volume of media coverage. The datais organised according to emerging themes, and the analysis is done by critical reading of theverbal and visual texts. The findings are that both the local and international media usediscursive strategies that negatively represented the floods as destructive without due attentionto the possible contribution of unsustainable agricultural activities of humans that are likely tohave triggered or exacerbated the disaster and its effects. In addition, overlapping andinterlocking discourses, namely humanitarian, hegemonic and expertise discourses, are evidentof the dependencies in the global north – south divide. Further, there is a generic positiveportrayal of the donor countries and non-profit organisations as effective and with agency, andat the same time a negative representation of the Malawian government and victims of the crisisas passive recipients of the relief aid.Although the multimodal analysis shows how the reporting upholds and perpetuates stereotypesof gender in the media representation of the disasters, this analysis established that there isminimal difference between ways in which men and women are portrayed by the local (insider)as compared to the international (outsider) media. This is significant considering anotherstereotype according to which the people of the UK are seen to be relatively liberal and sensitiveto gender role casting as opposed to the African media that are seen be relatively conservativein subscribing to traditional gender role casting.Overall, the findings reveal that the media representation of the floods is not neutral; rather itis socially constructed with various ideological perspectives. The study contributes greatly toan understanding of the general linguistic and visual discursive tendencies that local print andinternational media use in the portrayal of participants in a flooding disaster that occurred in arelatively remote country such as Malawi. In addition, it fills a gap that exists in semiotics onthe empirical studies that focus on the interplay between verbal texts and images in disasterrepresentations in African contexts specifically, and in the global south more broadly.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University