A discursive representation of the gitmo-2 and the relationship between Ghana and America in Ghanaian newspapers

Abstract

The main thrust of this study is to examine the linguistic resources that are used to represent the Gitmo-2 and to construct the Ghana-America relationship in Ghanaian media. The lack of research on modern forms of imperialism from the linguistic point of view in Ghana motivated the study. A corpus of 139,668 words of media articles and reports comprising editorials, opinion pieces, and Facebook posts and comments on the Gitmo-2 for the periods first quarter of 2016 and last quarter of 2018 was built. The CDA approach, DHA, together with Cohen’s Moral Panic theory were employed in the analysis. The study reveals that discourses on the Gitmo-2 embedded other discourses such as political and religious issues. Again, grammatical forms such as nominals, adjectival modifiers, and parallelism, are employed to represent the Gitmo-2 as terrorists/criminals, a threat to Ghana’s security, and undesirables; whereas nouns, adjectives phrases, and clauses are used to construct the complicated Ghana-America relationship. The study finds that resistance discourse in the media occurs subtly, therefore shedding some light on the language use in the media as not only performing the informative function but also as a manipulative tool. The findings and conclusions drawn from the study highlight the need to study language use in the media to unravel hidden ideologies.