Obfuscating Agency in Pakistani Newspaper Reporting: A Discourse- based Perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of strategies to obfuscate agency such as metonymic expressions, passive structures and nominalization as a resource for constructing knowledge in media discourses. The methodological framework of the study is inspired by Halliday’s (2004) concept of grammatical metaphor. Linguistic choices play a critical role in facilitating ideological information flow, for example, nominalization structure the information in ways which allow writers’ perspective on events to be conveyed to the reader (Halliday and Martin, 1993). The data for this study come from three Pakistani daily English newspapers: Dawn, the News and the Nation, selected on the basis of their wide circulation. A sample analysis has confirmed the working hypothesis that nominalizations are useful in abstracting and classifying actions and events in order to build and organize media discourses (for a fuller account see Fairclough 2010). The study explores the lexico-grammatical patterns which have been deployed to build ideological positions, maintain power relations and relate with the literature in the field that journalists use in order to inculcate particular socio-political morals in the consumers.