Abstract:
This study aimed to determine the discursive devices used in the selected news
headlines to unravel the ideologies behind the news captions, the motives of the media
practitioners and reveal to reveal the insights that will be generated from the findings.
Forty headlines were purposively sampled from eight major newspaper portals in
Ghana on the 2022 budget. This is a qualitative study that hinged on Fairclough’s
(1995) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The results were grouped into four major
captions used by media practitioners to attract attention of readers. It was also evident
that the devices used helped to bring out the media practitioners’ ideologies. The
selection of the words used in the headlines showed the political dispositions of the
news practitioners who intentionally chose only those news headlines that are
sensational. In addition, there was a lot of incompatibility in the way state owned and
privately owned newspapers reported issues in the 2022 budget of the Republic of
Ghana. Lexical choice in private newspaper headlines paint a negative picture of the
government, and pushes readers to see the government as insensitive to the pressing
needs of Ghanaians. On the other hand, the state-owned newspapers present the budget
as if all is well with the citizens. The results of this study may guide news consumers
not to just read the headlines but read the entire article so that they will be able to
decipher whether the issue is true or not, slanted or sensationalized.
Description:
A thesis in the Department of Communication Instruction,
School of Communication and Media Studies,
submitted to the School of Graduate Studies
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of
Master of Art
(Communication Instruction)
in the University of Education, Winneba
NOVEMBER, 2023
