‘Stealing Money’ OR ‘Embezzling Public Funds’: Construing sleaze in the Ugandan press via legalese

Abstract

This study examines the construction of news reportage relating to normative breach. It analyses news stories on major corruption incidents involving embezzlement and the misuse of public funds by government officials in Uganda. The study employs a discourse analysis to explore how corruption is constructed and construed in the print media. It invokes Appraisal Theory to analyse hard news reports recounting corruption occurrences, proceedings or findings of commissions of inquiry into corruption incidents and arrests of suspects, public hearings and court proceedings of suspected corrupt persons across two daily newspapers published in English. The study explicates the nature of linguistic evaluative resources that news writers invoke to map feelings, and to evaluate news actors, processes and phenomena. The analysis reveals that news reporters heavily rely on external texts and voices to recount corruption stories. These sources are couched in legal language (legalese), which in turn impinges on the linguistic resources employed to evaluate news actors. Whereas this rhetorical strategy enables the news report to achieve ‘objectivity’, it appears to protect the journalist against defamation or slander. Appraisal analysis reveals dominant instances of negative inscriptions of the social sanction of propriety, namely overt negative evaluations of non-compliance with the civic responsibilities and state laws. The news reportage exhibits positive attributes of corrupt persons in relation to their material wealth and social capital. Finally, the study also reveals the journalistic stance towards corruption, which is covertly shown via modes of meaning intensification.