A critical discourse analysis of newspaper reportage of 2022 budget of the republic of Ghana

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.