Concealment Strategies in Media Representation of Covid-19 Discourse

Abstract

The outbreak of Covid-19 in Nigeria in February 2020 has generated different opinions. The opinions have not gone without the attention of the media and it has led media and media participants to adopt different strategies in reporting the news. One of the adopted strategies is concealment. Previous studies have engaged the use of concealment strategies in medical interactions and media discourse. However, they have not engaged the use of concealment strategies by the media participants in disease outbreak. The present study engages concealment strategies used by participants in Covid-19 discourse in Nigerian media and examines the motivations and implications of the strategies for the society. The study adopts Fairclough’s model of CDA to reveal the strategies.
Qualitative analysis is adopted to analyse relevant data collected from four Nigerian newspapers, the Punch, Vanguard, Premium Times and Sahara Reporters. Purposive sample method of data collection is adopted to manually assess the data. News reports and opinion news constitute the corpus for this work. Six concealment strategies were identified in the discourse, qualifier, pronoun, lexical replacement, deflection, jargonisation, and stalling, which are used for prevention of drug abuses, face saving, emphases on reality of the disease and to cover the inadequacies of the government. The study encourages the use of concealment strategies, especially, during health emergencies.