A Study of Terrorism Discourse in TaifaLeo Newspaper of Kenya

Abstract

Terrorism is a global concern and usually elicits a lot of sensationalism every time it occurs. The media often finds itself in the middle of debates over this issue. Apart from the role of informing the public, the media has a responsibility of avoiding the creation of animosity amongst the readers. The choice of language used by the media can create a negative attitude towards one another among the readers and the public in general. This research investigated discourse on national and international terrorism in TaifaLeo, a daily published in Kiswahili language in Kenya. The main objective was to analyze the language used in reporting terrorism news in the newspaper. The intention was to find out how the language used in those specific news items created bias in presentation of terrorism news. The parts of the newspaper that had reports on terrorism were isolated and analyzed over a period of one year. The study revealed that there was bias in the way this newspaper reported terrorism news. The biases that were noted were mostly caused by discourse structures that were provided by either the reporters or the sources they quoted. Keywords: Terrorism news, reporting, bias, language use