IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/alk/jpds00/v1y2022i1id4685.html

Representation of Nigerian Internet Scamsters in Selected Nigerian and International News Reports

Author

Listed:
  • Opeyemi Emmanuel OLAWE

    (Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria)

Abstract

Linguistic studies on Nigerian internet scamsters have dwelt on the aspects of language use. These studies focused on the linguistic features, slangy expressions, discourse and persuasive strategies used by scamsters in scam messages. However, the aspect of media representation of the social actors of Nigerian internet fraud has not been given adequate attention. This study, therefore, explores the representation of social actors of Nigerian internet fraud in Nigerian and international news reports. Headlines and news contents are purposively sampled from forty-five news articles published between 2019 and 2021 from two Nigerian newspapers and two international news media. Guided by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Van Leeuwen’s early work on social actor representation (1996), ten forms of representations were identified. Nigerian Internet Scamsters were represented as educated role models, imposters, parentally supported, abductors, wrong ambassadors/negative nationals, friends to the security agents, desperate/money ritualists, guilty and convicted, exploiters and victimizers. The negative connotation of these labels indicates that the media are not neutral in their representation of scammers. This study shows that the representation of the social actions and actors in internet fraud are linguistically and discursively framed to fit their ideology.

Suggested Citation

Handle: RePEc:alk:jpds00:v:1:y:2022:i:1:id:4685
as

Download full text from publisher

File URL: https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jpds/article/view/4685
File Function: Abstract page
Download Restriction: no
File URL: https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jpds/article/download/4685/3933
File Function: Full text
Download Restriction: no
---><---

More about this item

Keywords

;
;
;
;
;
;
;

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:alk:jpds00:v:1:y:2022:i:1:id:4685. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Al-Kindi Center for Research and Development (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jpds .

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.