A Study on the Use of Corruption Metaphors in the Online Media of Nigeria, Iraq and Malaysia

Abstract

The paper studied the use of metaphors of corruption in the online newspapers of three countries: Nigeria, Iraq and Malaysia in order to determine how the media of the different countries conceptualize the concept of corruption. To do that, five online newspapers were selected from each country for the study. The aim was to see how different the media of the three countries are in conceptualizing corruption in their writing. Only the editorials of the newspapers were used for the study. These online newspapers were selected purposively based on their popularity in each country. The researchers adopted the Lackoff and Johnson’s (1978) Conceptual Metaphor Theory as the framework for the study. It was fathomed that Nigerian online newspapers made use of more metaphors to capture corruption than the Iraq and Malaysian Editorials. This may partly be because of how widespread corruption has overwhelmed the country. The three most frequent metaphors used by the Nigerian Editorials were those related to concepts, war and man while for Iraq, it was the metaphors of corruption being a culture, war and cancer that were more frequently used in their editorials. While the Malaysian Editorials conceptualized corruption with the mappings of an orientation, virus and war. From these, it could be deduced that, that all the countries in their portrayal of corruption see it as a war that need to be fought because of its evil nature.