TRANSITIVITY CHOICES AND IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS IN MURDER STORIES IN THE KENYAN MEDIA

Murder news events, like all other news events, can be presented in a number of perspectives to reveal different ideological perspectives advanced by varied media houses. This article studies different ideologies advanced in the murder news through transitivity choices made by reporters. On the basis of the purposively sampled news stories on murders in Kenya from the year 2018 to 2019, the study qualitatively examines the efficacy of the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), as a theoretical tool in the analysis of ideology in four different newspaper in Kenya i.e the Daily Nation, the Standard, the Star and the Nairobian, in relation to the representation of murder stories. The study hypothesizes that ideological forces have altered the main purpose of the media through the way news is written, organized and delivered, and that, from a socio-linguistic point of view, the consequences of these forces are observable at a transitivity level of linguistic analysis. The findings indicate that news reporters use transitivity choices to propagate and perpetuate certain ideologies either tacitly or overtly in newspaper headlines.