Sexual violence reporting in the Ugandan press: a discursive news values analysis

Abstract

This study explored the linguistic construction of news values in two Ugandan newspapers, namely, The Red Pepper and The Kampala Sun. In particular, the study examined how sexual violence is made newsworthy in the online articles of the newspapers. Drawing on Bednarek and Caple’s (2014, 2017) Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) framework which examines how news values are established through semiotic resources, the study examined what news values tend to be associated with sexual violence news across the newspapers, as well as the comparative linguistic devices invoked by journalists to construct sexual violence events as newsworthy. In addition, the study examined the discursive positions taken by journalists while recounting sexual violence events in the newspapers. The data used in the study is drawn from twenty-seven (27) news reports covering the period between January 2018 and December 2022. To reveal the linguistic resources that construct news values, an analytical framework was designed based on Bednarek and Caple (2017). Reference was also made to Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (2007) and Carter and McCarthy (2006). The analysis focused on syntactic, lexical and compositional features as well as stylistic variations between the two newspapers. The findings reveal that, specifically, Eliteness, Negativity and Superlativeness are the news values constantly occuring in the news reports. However, The Kampala Sun repeatedly enhances Eliteness through lengthy direct speech where implicit view points are made by letting elite voices ‘speak’ in the news. The findings also suggest that while The Red Pepper journalists had a stronger tendency to ensure newsworthiness through Negativity, there are lexical items in the newspaper which delegitimize Negativity by eroticizing rape, inversely making the crime look attractive. Future research should combine Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis with DNVA, to enable a more in-depth analysis of these items.