Abstract

Events are made to mean by their definers. So with one voice the international media "shocked' the world in 1995 with the story that the military regime in Nigeria hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni ethnic rights activists. International reactions were dramatic especially at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in New Zealand where the body swiftly handed a two-year suspension to Nigeria. Offences against democracy and human rights became the trigger-phrases that rendered the executions in Nigeria meaningful. This thesis does a contextual, epistemological interrogation of the Western definition of the Nigerian event based on the study of the contents of three Canadian daily papers--the Globe & Mail, the Ottawa Citizen and Le Devoir. Employing cultural-critical discourse analysis, the research found that (i) the Canadian news dislocated the Nigerian story from its native moorings and employed Western/Canadian fiction about Africa and the developing world in framing the news narrative; (ii) the Canadian news embodied the Western tendency to universalize its socio-cultural and political (ideological) values; and (iii) the dominance of the Western news interpretation rendered alternative and oppositional interpretations unacceptable and hence delegitimized. By drawing attention to news as a cultural event, and to the occlusion of Other cognitive contexts, the Canadian news, as part of the international news discourse and containment of events in the non-Western world, is seen to have kept alive a questionable, but yet dominant, Western paradigm of representation