2010 Communal Electoral Campaign News Reports in Burundi: A Discourse Analysis

In 2010, Burundi held elections with 40 different political parties (the ruling party and opposition parties) competing. The elections were held in three steps, the local, the legislative, and the presidential elections. This was a hot topic because communal elections were considered very determining as winning them was likely to lead to winning the other elections. The campaigns were widely reported in both local and international press, but the study was carried out only on the Burundian press. The present study examines written news reports by applying speech act theory (Austin, 1962), implicature (Grice, 1957), and pragmatic presupposition (Huang, 2017). More specifically, the aim of this study is therefore to analyze pragmatically how newspaper reporters use these language facilities to send messages to their audience and the implications these messages had on Burundians. This study was conducted in light of the following research questions:(1) How did the journalists use language to report the news events during the electoral campaign? (2) What implications did the language used in the news reports have on Burundians? The news reports were collected from two main local newspapers in Burundi; one public newspaper (Le Renouveau) and a private one (Iwacu). To supplement the news reports the context in which the election took place was used to be able to analyze the information reported in the newspapers. Results indicate that journalists reported the news through the use of different strategies following the choice the contestants made to achieve their goals. Implicature was used by very few contestants because of its vague and ambiguous language. Others preferred pragmatic presuppositions that allowed them to establish closer relationship with their audience and a large number of contestants used speech acts that allowed them to send explicit and clear messages. Although the campaign was made in a climate of political tension among the contestants, newspaper reporters used explicit language that openly criticized the authorities in power. It is the kind of language that is expected of the electoral campaign even though it had implications on the going on of the campaign