Characterizing Conflict in Pictures: A Multimodal Analysis of Reports of the Agatu-Fulani Crisis of March/April, 2016

Authors

  • Fúnmi O. Olúbọ̀dé-Sàwẹ Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria

Keywords:

News stories, Images, Mood and Factual Mismatch
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Abstract

Newspaper stories are typically not presented solely as text, but are usually accompanied with images. It is also believed that one picture is worth a thousand words (Smiciklas, 2012). News stories therefore lend themselves to a multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), a study of the intersection and interdependence of various modalities of communication within a given context (Royce and Bowcher, 2007). Therefore, as a follow-up to an earlier critical discourse analysis of news representations of the Agatu-Fulani conflict of March/April, 2016 in terms of four parameters: nature of the conflict; the actors; the action and the victims (Olubode-Sawe, 2018), this paper attempts to show how accompanying images contribute to or detract from those characterizations. Only about half of the pictures factually match the stories, and in only a third does the mood match the visual. In some stories, the photos actually subvert the text, telling a slightly different story from that presented in words.

 

References

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Published

2020-07-01

How to Cite

O. Olúbọ̀dé-Sàwẹ F. . (2020). Characterizing Conflict in Pictures: A Multimodal Analysis of Reports of the Agatu-Fulani Crisis of March/April, 2016. Journal of The Linguistic Association of Nigeria, 23(1), 1–15. Retrieved from https://jolan.com.ng/index.php/home/article/view/253