Metaphorical representations of political action and resistance in Kenyan newspaper headlines, 2024

Abstract

This study investigates the use of metaphor in the construction of political and socio-economic discourse in Kenyan newspaper headlines published between January and December 2024. A corpus of over 600 headlines was drawn from The Daily Nation and The Standard.  Three theories are used together: Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) by Charteris-Black (2004, 2011), Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) by Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 2003), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Fairclough (1995, 2003) to establish how metaphors framed government action, leadership, crisis, leadership, and citizen unrest. The findings reveal dominant metaphorical framings of politics as war, governance as illness, the economy as a burden, and protest as a natural force or bodily disruption. These metaphors contribute to the ideological positioning of actors, shape public perceptions, and reinforce elite centred narratives. In this paper, I argue that metaphor in headline discourse functions as a key ideological resource in the reproduction of political hegemony within Kenya’s contested media space. Importantly, the study demonstrates the value of the intergrating CMT, CMA and CDA approach t unpack the ideological dimensions of media metaphor thus offering new insights into how hegemonic discourses are constructed and how they are contested in the Kenyan public discourse.