Newspaper Commentaries Research Articles

The Niger Delta Amnesty – An Amnesty in Search of a Legal Legitimacy

On the 6 th of August 2009, the former President of Nigeria, Umaru Musa Yar’adua, (now late), declared amnesty for militants of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria (here in after called “the Niger Delta Amnesty”) based on the recommendation of the Presidential Technical Committee on the Niger Delta. The paper uses doctrinaire approach to appraise the Niger Delta Amnesty touted as a “home grown” amnesty. Based on statutes, case laws, opinions of legal text writers, newspaper comments and internet sources, it disappointedly finds out that the Niger Delta Amnesty, unlike many other amnesties, is not anchor on any known Nigeria law. It is the contention of the paper that such an important public proclamation should be anchored on a constitutional provision or an Act of the National Assembly. In the absence of such a legal validity, the paper recommends that the President of Nigeria should, as a matter of public importance and urgency, package the Niger Delta Amnesty Program in form of Executive bill and forward the same to the National Assembly for enactment as a law. This, the paper believes will guarantee its longevity and secure it from being used as a political tool. Keywords: amnesty, pardon, clemency, militants, militancy, impunity, legitimacy DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/101-06 Publication date: September 30 th 2020

An Enhanced Corpus for Arabic Newspapers Comments

In this paper, we propose our enhanced approach to create a dedicated corpus for Algerian Arabic newspapers comments. The developed approach has to enhance an existing approach by the enrichment of the available corpus and the inclusion of the annotation step by following the Model Annotate Train Test Evaluate Revise (MATTER) approach. A corpus is created by collecting comments from web sites of three well know Algerian newspapers. Three classifiers, support vector machines, naïve Bayes, and k-nearest neighbors, were used for classification of comments into positive and negative classes. To identify the influence of the stemming in the obtained results, the classification was tested with and without stemming. Obtained results show that stemming does not enhance considerably the classification due to the nature of Algerian comments tied to Algerian Arabic Dialect. The promising results constitute a motivation for us to improve our approach especially in dealing with non Arabic sentences, especially Dialectal and French ones

The Financing of Political Newspaper Commentary in Late Eighteenth-Century England

This article explores the financing of the newspaper content most closely identified with political commentary in the second half of the eighteenth century: the ‘letters to the editor’. Based on an important but largely unnoticed paragraph from John Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide, and a published excerpt from the account books of the Morning Herald, it argues that, while newspaper proprietors paid correspondents primarily for news and miscellany, they could also pay for letters of commentary (or publish them free of charge), if these were particularly well written and on topics of notable public interest. Importantly, however, they would also charge authors wishing to disseminate political texts, especially if these promulgated the commercial or political interests of individuals or larger interest groups.

Disbelief and counter-voices: a thematic analysis of online reader comments about sexual harassment and sexual violence against women

ABSTRACT Research about online comment fields on news websites tends to foreground their potential for deliberative discussions whilst little attention is given to the ways these spaces reinforce existing gender inequalities. This study analyses online newspaper comments on articles about gender based violence to establish whether the historic marginalisation of women within public discussions is being reasserted online. Using thematic analysis, this study found that responses were characterised by disbelief. Posters questioned the type and nature of evidence that had been provided, they questioned whether these problems resulted from sexism and they questioned the feminist agenda behind the blogs. While voices expressing disbelief were dominant, there were counter-voices attempting to critique the scepticism by advocating for the importance of the lived experience women and girls. The study demonstrates that online comments on news websites operate as gendered spaces that can marginalise women from the public discussion of social problems.

Import of family and peers in a writer’s life

A writer anywhere must have roots and familial relationships. In a general sense, it is the energy derived from friends, family or society that drives the human spirit. A major role the family has in the life of a writer is giving him or her space. What this means is that a literaryfriendly family will not come between the writer and his/her writing. When he/she is engaged with writing, the writer’s family excuses him/ her from domestic and other duties. It is also beneficial when the writer is surrounded by a wife/husband and children who are wonderful readers. It is the relevance of the family that inspired this research. The paper investigates how culture, society and the family are significant in the life of every man or woman. It focuses on the experiences of writers in their home countries and overseas. The author discovered that writers in 17th century Europe worked closely together. The practice has hardly caught on among Nigerian writers. The writer could hardly find instances to prove otherwise. It is intended in this work, therefore, to highlight this shortcoming and to show how it contributes to the attainment of desired goals in the writer’s literary endeavours. The bulk of the data for this study was collected through listening to stories of writers and also reading various comments in newspapers and other publications.
 Keywords: Language and culture, Family and peers, Pedagogy, Spousal problems, Writers’ life

Being Negative to be Popular: Style in Online Comments at the Mail Online

Language users may make stylistic choices to signal group membership (Rampton 2002). The use of an aggregate of common linguistic features that are distinct from those of other groups of language users can be a sign of shared values in a linguistic ‘community of practice’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). New members of such a community display their knowledge of the group’s practices, and thus their desire to be accepted as members of the community, by mimicking the language of more established members. The purpose of this research is to uncover stylistic features of a relatively new genre of text, online newspaper comments. This research argues that comments posted by readers of online newspapers provide us with the opportunity to both identify some shared stylistic features of a community of practice and to see how other readers evaluate the use of those features by deciding whether or not to approve or disapprove of the comments made. The top-rated comments from Mail Online newspaper articles with more than one thousand comments were collected over a period of one week, leading to a dataset of 65 comments that were analysed qualitatively using discourse analytic tools. The high number of approving votes for these comments suggests that other readers approve of their content and stylistic delivery. Previous studies (Anderson et al. 2014; Blom et al. 2014; Reagle 2015; Santana 2011) have suggested that online comments tend to be negative, but have said little about how the comments are realised or why there is a tendency to be negative. Based on the results of this analysis I argue that, through the use of common language choices (similar grammatical structures, little or no epistemic modality, implicature), commentators aim to accrue upvotes to validate themselves as core members of the Mail Online commentator community of practice.

A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF MODALITY IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION CAMPAIGNS IN NIGERIA

This article examines modal resources in the mediatised discourse of social transformation in Nigeria with a view to showing how they are strategically used to code interpersonal meanings for enhanced and impactful delivery of messages of social transformation in the nation. Data for the study comprises texts on aspects of social transformation campaigns in Nigeria in the context of democracy, anti-corruption crusade, insecurity and domestic violence compiled as small corpora. The data comprises texts produced by government and non-governmental actors consisting of speeches, radio commentaries, jingles, printed texts, interviews, tweets and online newspaper comments and covers the period from March 2013 to March 2018. The five-year span was informed by the wide gamut of negative realities in the nation during the time frame which led to increased mediatisation of social transformation messages. Corpus-assisted critical discourse approach was employed for data analysis, using Fairclough’s (1989, revised 2015) dialectical relational approach, the corpus linguistic tool of Antconc, chi-square test on R-Studio and normalised relative frequencies. Data analysis revealed that the different participants in the discourse characteristically used different modal resources to reflect their power on the one hand and resistance on the other and to capture the intensity of their views and feelings on the actions required for Nigeria to experience genuine social transformation. The study concludes that even though the discourse is largely ideational, modal resources are deployed for emphasising the urgency and seriousness of the issues in the ideational contents of the discourse.

HOMOPHOBIA AND ‘UN-AMERICANNESS’ AS RISING FACETS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA: AN ANALYSIS OF ORLANDO SHOOTING MEDIA TRANSCRIPTS

HOMOPHOBIA AND ‘UN-AMERICANNESS’ AS RISING FACETS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA: AN ANALYSIS OF ORLANDO SHOOTING MEDIA TRANSCRIPTS

“How ELSE are you supposed to dress up like a Black Guy??”: negotiating accusations of Blackface in online newspaper comments

ABSTRACT This study examines how individuals talk about race and racism, and the resonance of their discourses with existing narratives. For this purpose, this article investigates users’ comments (N = 887) on four newspaper articles from the US and France about Antoine Griezmann's Blackface in December 2017. A thematic analysis revealed (i) the vast majority of users shared similar views of racism by emphasizing individual agency over structural and historical systems of oppression. Although (ii) users actively referred to colour-blindness, their comments appeared to be based on different understandings of “race” shaped by national discourses. Finally, (iii) users vastly criticized political correctness, which revealed expressions of Whiteness as well as the intersection of class and racism. The findings underline the gap between users’ views and scholarly discourses. This study also highlights the limitations of methodological nationalism in the study of racism, and importance of examining discourses emanating from various imagined communities instead.

Taxpaying, Importing, Enforcing: Emerging discourse patterns in online newspaper comments about US immigrant education

Recent scholarship suggests that social norms are becoming more permissive of prejudicial talk about immigrants in the United States (Crandall, Miller, & White, 2018). This is in keeping with trends observed internationally (e.g., Krzyzanowski, 2018; Vollmer & Karakayali, 2018). Past studies of discourse about immigration in the United States have identified a number of patterns — most notably those relating immigrants to threat (e.g., Santa Ana, 2002) — though some have found patterns framing immigration as beneficial (e.g., Strauss, 2012). This study explores discursive patterns about immigrant education in online comments from American newspapers. It focuses on change exhibited by exploring salient lexical and thematic patterns in 2016 comments relative to such patterns in 2009 comments. Using a corpus linguistics design, keyword, thematic, and other analytical techniques were applied to identify and describe the most prominent new patterns in the 2016 comments. Seven themes, through which immigration was framed negatively, emerged as new and salient in 2016. The article also includes discussion of cross-thematic patterns (e.g., a zero-sum framework) identified in the analysis.

“Late dividends of the British Empire”: Language ideologies and the native/non-native question in online newspaper comments

AbstractAs the use of English as a lingua franca increases in a range of contexts, one question that has received recent media attention is that of whether native or non-native speakers are more effective communicators in these contexts. The native/non-native question resists a straightforward answer, but taking account of the views of people in the business world is a necessary step towards understanding the underlying issues. This article investigates the nature and origin of these views by analysing online newspaper comments written in response to a column in theFinancial Times. It first identifies several topics related to the native/non-native question, including perceived differences between and within the two categories. It then discusses these topics from a language-ideological perspective, aiming to identify the patterns of beliefs and assumptions that inform the comments. Although this perspective involves a critical evaluation of the binary “native/non-native” opposition, the article identifies several important effects of the native speaker concept, ranging from outright discrimination to feelings of frustration and inhibition. It portrays the comments as both reflecting and questioning the ideological premises of the native speaker concept, and it considers the implications of the approach for ELF research and for the wider study of international communication.

SANA: Sentiment analysis on newspapers comments in Algeria

It is very current in today life to seek for tracking the people opinion from their interaction with occurring events. A very common way to do that is comments in articles published in newspapers web sites dealing with contemporary events. Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is an emergent field who’s the purpose is finding the behind phenomenon masked in opinionated texts. We are interested in our work by comments in Algerian newspaper websites. For this end, two corpora were used; SANA and OCA. SANA corpus is created by collection of comments from three Algerian newspapers, and annotated by two Algerian Arabic native speakers, while OCA is a freely available corpus for sentiment analysis. For the classification we adopt Supports vector machines, naïve Bayes and k-nearest neighbors. Obtained results are very promising and show the different effects of stemming in such domain, also k-nearest neighbors gives important improvement comparing to other classifiers unlike similar works where SVM is the most dominant. From this study we observe the importance of dedicated resources and methods the newspaper comments sentiment analysis which we look forward in future works.

Amica America: Raymond Aron’s Views on Franco-American Relations in 1945

During the Second World War, Raymond Aron began publishing political commentary in journals and newspapers aimed at a general non-expert readership. This wartime undertaking would become a life-long commitment to expanding political debate beyond the professional spheres of academia and policy making. This study recovers and analyses a concise article that Aron published in August 1945 in the French illustrated journal Point de vue. This forgotten journalistic source reflects idea of the role and responsibility of the public intellectual in a changing world and powerfully conveys three important aspects of Aron’s international thought. First, Aron implicitly advances the idea that the general public has a key function in shaping democratic foreign policy. Moreover, I argue that Aron’s short political analysis provides valuable insight on two theoretical notions that merit the attention of international relations scholars: the concept of ‘friendship’ in international relations and the idea of popular ‘spatial awareness’ as condition for a democratic state’s position in international order. This study suggests that in Aron’s vision of post-war order, articulated immediately after the end of the Second World War, the invocation of the idea of ‘Amica America’ sought to redefine the relations between France and the United States, but also the very political future of the Hexagon.

The State Con-Con Papers

The State Con-Con Papers is a collection of J.H. Snider’s 47 short essays on the history, democratic function, and politics of the periodic state constitutional convention referendum, which is mandated by 14 U.S. state constitutions. The essays, organized chronologically, cover four of the most recent referendums: Hawaii (2018), New York (2017), Rhode Island (2014), and Maryland (2010). In each of these four states, the convention referendum is the only constitutional mechanism that allows the people — the sovereign — to bypass the state legislature’s gatekeeping power over constitutional amendment. The title, The State Con-Con Papers, draws an analogy with The Federalist Papers, a famous collection of newspaper commentaries that discuss the proposals generated by America’s 1787 constitutional convention.

VARIASI BAHASA DALAM KOLOM MELA KOMENTAR SURAT KABAR RAKYAT BENGKULU

The purpose of this study is to describe the variation of spoken language in the column Mela Bengkulu People's newspaper commentary and language variations in the column Mela Bengkulu People's newspaper comments in terms of formality. This research uses descriptive research design and using documentation technique as data collection tool. For data analysis, the following steps are used: (1) read carefully, (2) code every data obtained, (3) tabulate data used to describe language usage, (4) analyze data of spoken language in terms of level (5) classify the results of data analysis, (6) synthesize the results of classification, (7) conclude. From the result of the research, it is found that the variation of language in Mela Comments column used standard oral language and non standard oral language. Language variations seen in terms of formality are used diverse casual and familiar variety. The marker of standard oral spoken language is seen in the use of Indonesian vocabulary and diction and no regional language elements. Markers of oral spoken language use are not seen in non-standard word usage, regional/foreign language usage, slang usage and presence of expression statements. Markers of casual usage are seen in the use of regional/foreign languages, the use of non-standard words, the use of slang and expressions. The use of familiar varieties is seen in the use of the word hello, the use of regional/foreign languages and typical terms. Conclusion; Language variations in the October 26 to 24 November 2016 edition of Mela Comments column of 26 topics with 265 speeches, can be summarized by 38 speeches using standard oral language and 227 using non-standard spoken language. Language variations are viewed in terms of its formality using a variety of casual and diverse. Keywords: language variation, mela komentar column, Rakyat Bengkulu newspaper

Peer Influence of Online Comments in Newspapers: Applying Social Norms and the Social Identification Model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE)

This research aimed to understand social influence of comments by answering the following questions: How do online comments impact subsequent readers’ attitudes and perceptions related to the subject matter covered in the newspaper article? Can such impact vary by the degree of social identification? Drawing on the literature on social norms and the social identification model of deindividuation effects (SIDE), the current study examined how the valence of comments affects comment readers’ responses and how the social identification process influences such responses. Findings from an online experiment supported the SIDE model: Stronger social identification increased social influence. Results showed that comments on newspaper work as peer influence in that comments prompt comment readers to adjust their views with reading of others’ comments.

Proudly for Brooke: Race-Conscious Campaigning in 1960s Massachusetts

AbstractScholars have credited the victory of Edward Brooke, America's first popularly elected black U.S. senator, to a “deracialized” or “color-blind” election strategy in which both the candidate and the electorate ignored racial matters. This article revises this prevailing historical explanation of Brooke's election. Drawing from the historical-ideational paradigm of Desmond King and Rogers Smith, this paper argues that Brooke was much more of a “race-conscious” candidate than is generally remembered. Primary documents from the 1966 campaign reveal that Brooke spoke openly against racial inequality, argued in favor of racially targeted policies, and called for stronger racial equality legislation. In addition, this paper argues that Brooke's appeals were not targeted primarily to the state's small black population but to liberal whites. Far from ignoring race, internal campaign documents and interviews with campaign staff reveal that Brooke's campaign strategists sought to appeal to white desires to “do the right thing” by electing an African American candidate. Internal polling documents from the Brooke campaign and newspaper commentaries further demonstrate that a proportion of the white electorate cited Brooke's race as the reasonforsupporting his candidacy. This paper suggests that Brooke's election was extremely well timed—coming soon after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act but before the urban riots of the “long hot summer of 1967”, the King assassination riots, and anti-busing riots in Boston. The first half of Brooke's 1966 campaign slogan “Proudly for Brooke: A Creative Republican” signals the race-conscious dynamics of his candidacy.

Electoral Violence and the Challenge of Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria

Elections are the hallmarks of democracy; they also serve the purpose of peaceful change in government and confer political legitimacy on the government. Viewed from this prism, elections represent the expression of the sovereign will of the people. However, the conduct of elections in a plural society like Nigeria is often fraught with animosities and violence. Failing is the process to satisfy the test of popular participation and legitimacy. At the core of this bitter contest is the struggle for power by factional elite groups perceived as representing ethno religious and regional interest. Electoral seasons more than anytime else reveals the fragility and soft underbelly of the Nigerian state. The country’s electoral history is replete with narratives of flawed and disputed elections that have turned violent, resulting in numerous fatalities and reversing previous attempts at democratic consolidation. The 2015 general election was unprecedented in the annals of the country because for the first time an entrenched and incumbent party was defeated at the polls, and the country witnessed a peaceful alternation of power between contending political parties thereby fulfilling one of the preconditions for democratic consolidation. A tensed pre-election political atmosphere occasioned by the activities of the terrorist group, Boko Haram, that then controlled a large swath of Nigeria’s territory and a fragmented elite divided along ethno-religious and regional lines foreshadowed the election. Shuttle diplomacy by the United States secretary of state and the constitution of body called ‘National Peace Committee’ comprised of Kofi Anan, the immediate past secretary general of the United Nations, past presidents of Nigeria and leading clergymen and the postponement of the election date by six weeks before the electoral management body could deliver an election whose outcome was accepted by the contending political parties and averting the prediction of an apocalyptic endgame. This study seeks to engage the factors that make conduct of elections in Nigeria to be violent prone and undermine attempts at institutionalising a democratic tradition. The methodology is qualitative in approach, relying on secondary data from books, journal articles and newspaper commentaries.

A comparative review of how the policy and procedures to assess research impact evolved in Australia and the UK

This article offers a systematic review of the evolution of research impact assessment in Australia and the UK. We consider its inception and detail the development of relevant policy and procedures in each country. The article sets out the results of a comparative analysis of public policy documents, newspaper commentary, and academic literature in both countries. We examined the differences and commonalities between the two nations, revealing evaluation criteria and uncovering justifications for the adoption of impact assessment. The article highlights the convergence and divergence of the two countries' policy and procedures, as well as the political and bureaucratic contexts that have shaped their design and implementation. The article shows that the synergistic, intermittent, and iterative development of relevant policy and procedures in the two nations has been mutually beneficial for the evolution of retrospective impact assessment.

The sharing economy and digital discrimination: The case of Airbnb

Digital discrimination has become a buzz word following the recent reports of racial and other discrimination associated with Airbnb. This issue is perceived to pose serious concerns with the rapid growth of the sharing economy. This research derives insights into digital discrimination through the lens of a series of online newspaper comments made in response to an article reporting Airbnb’s new anti-discrimination policy. The data were analysed by using text-mining and co-stakeholder analysis. The visualized network and each stakeholder’s surrounding discourse reveal that digital discrimination contains multiple layers and meaning constructions. This paper provides a starting point for tourism and hospitality researchers to contribute to the thinking around the digital discrimination with the rapid growth of the sharing economy.