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Item Discourse issues in Nigerian media reportage of Pro-Biafra protests in selected newspapers(Department of Linguistics, African Languages, and Communication Arts, Lagos State University (LASU), 2021) Osisanwo, A.; Iyoha, O.This study examines the discourse issues in the reportage of the 2015 and 2016 pro-Biafra protests in selected Nigerian newspapers. Previous studies on the reportage of protest have examined the representational and discursive strategies as well as the ideological inclinations in news reports, leaving the discourse issues in the protest understudied. The study therefore examines the discourse issues represented in the 2015 and 2016 pro-Biafra protest presented in selected Nigerian newspapers. Data for the study were news reports purposively drawn from four widely circulated Nigerian national dailies, The Punch, The Nation, The Sun and Vanguard newspapers which allocate sufficient space to the coverage of the protests. The period covered was between 2015 and 2016, a period when the protests were prominently reported in the country. Ruth Wodak’s Discourse Historical approach to Critical Discourse Analysis and M.A.K Halliday’s Transitivity model of Systemic Functional Linguistics served as the theoretical framework of the study. The data were subjected to critical discourse analysis. The discourse issues identified include marginalisation of the Igbo, worsening economic situation, human rights abuse, injustice, corruption and unemploymentItem ‘We are not terrorist, we are freedom fighters’: Discourse representation of the pro-Biafra protest in selected Nigerian newspapers(Sage Publications, 2020) Osisanwo, A.; Iyoha, O.The recent pro-Biafra protest across Nigeria has become an important topic in the news media where it has been constructed in different ways. Existing studies on media construction of protest have examined framing, speech acts and rhetorical strategies. However, adequate attention has not been given to the discursive representation of the 2015 and 2016 pro-Biafra protest. This study therefore examined the discourse strategies and the ideological inclinations of news reports on the 2015 and 2016 Biafra protest. Van Leeuwen’s representation of social actors and Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) serve as the theoretical underpinning of the study. Data were purposively drawn from four widely read and circulated Nigerian newspapers, The Punch, The Sun, The Vanguard and The Nation which allocate sufficient space to the coverage of the protests. The period covered was between 2015 and 2016, a period where the protest was most intense in the country. Three representational strategies which include ‘protesters as freedom fighters’, ‘protesters as economic saboteurs’ and ‘protesters as lawabiding citizens’ were discovered in the study. Ten strategies in van Leeuwen’s representation of social actors – passivisation, nomination, association, disassociation, exclusion, aggregation, functionalisation, differentiation, indetermination, collectivisation – were indexed in the representational strategies. These representations were also explicated by four processes which include material, verbal, relational and behavioural. The pro-Biafra protesters were equally represented as violent and unruly whereas the protesters construe themselves as lawabiding citizens and freedom fighters as against being treated as terrorists.