A Critical Discourse Analysis of The Sunday Mail’s and The Telegraph’s Representation of Zimbabwe’s 2008 Electoral Violence

Using the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework of Van Dijk T. A. (2000. Ideology and discourse: A multidisciplinary Introduction. Barcelona: Pompeu Fabra University Press), this article investigates the manifestation of linguistic differences in the discursive strategies of Zimbabwe’s The Sunday Mail’s and the UK’s The Telegraph’s coverage of 2008 electoral violence. A CDA analysis of a sample of 16 news stories based on van Dijk’s framework showed that the different ideological leanings of the two newspapers made them represent the same events on electoral violence in Zimbabwe differently, using two main macro-strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. These macro-strategies are realized through other micro-strategies that fall under them, the most important to this research being: lexicalization, consensus, illegality, presupposition and others. The study concludes that the power of language remains a weapon at the disposal of journalists in covering important news, and language use in news should be central in journalism and communication curriculums to help readers interpret journalists’ use of language as key to understanding news.