Framing Power and Passion: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Football Images in Newspapers

Abstract

Football reporting is an important cultural and communicative practice that intersects with identity, politics, economics, religion and social discourse. As the world’s most popular sport, football occupies a unique space in public discourse, and the media's presentation of the game plays a key role in shaping the understanding of the game. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and Priming Theories, this paper seeks to explore the metaphorical representation of the football experience in the field as well as the players as portrayed in The Daily Nation and The Standard newspapers in Kenya. The results of this study revealed that there are several images and metaphors used in reporting football, especially portraying power and identity while appealing to the emotions and responses of fans, influencing their behaviour. These images included: Tossing out, Which alludes to the use of violence to forcefully get something out of the way, referring to scoring as an act of spanking the other, also referring to scoring as drawing blood from an opponent, bounced back” and “clobbering which refers to a team as being dominant and assertive compared to the other team, Discipline’ which is associated with undesired results such as pain, loss and humiliation, the other one is the image of force which is used to imply that the victory was not easy to achieve; it had to be wrestled for or imposed through determination. The other images found in the reporting language of football in the dailies included: wailing and gnashing of teeth, relegation fires, pint-sized attacker, firepower in my strike force, barren draw with Tusker, meaning there were no goals, hacked down and last nail on Homeboyz coffins, among others