| dc.description.abstract | Online digital media is increasingly becoming popular as a platform for sharing opinions on political issues affecting the country. In Kenya, available literature on digital media and political opinions tend to focus on defining the conflicting positions of competing political actors and political parties rather than critical analysis and interpretation of linguistic manipulations in expression of recurring themes, ideologies, attitude and lexical choices depicting power relations. Writers of opinion articles in these online dailies use linguistic manipulations consciously or unconsciously. CDA is important in exposing underlying ideologies in the individual opinions and how they are constructed. The purpose of this study was therefore to critically analyse ideological opinions from local digital media on performance of Kenya's Jubilee government between 2013 and 2015. The specific objectives for this study were to: describe and discuss word frequencies revealing recurring themes in the opinions of Kenyans on Jubilee Government of Kenya, investigate concealed ideological components from the opinions of Kenyans on Jubilee government using presuppositions, evaluate metaphors to uncover the ideological attitudes from the opinions on Jubilee government and examine lexical choices revealing power relations from the opinions on Jubilee government of Kenya from Kenyan digital dailies. This study was guided by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as expounded by Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, and Ruth Wodak. This study adopts a corpus methodology. For the objectives of this study to be achieved, One thousand opinion articles were collected from three popular Kenyan digital dailies; Nation Media, Standard Media and Star Digital Media. Purposive sampling was used to select I 000 opinion articles from editorials, letters to the editor, commentaries and opinions. Analysis of data was done by uploading I 000 opinion articles into two software's; NVivo and WordSmith and also by using CDA. The findings of this study revealed that themes that recurred were differentiation, corruption, terrorism and push for equality. The study also revealed that tribalism, patriotism, dictatorship and fight against inequality were the concealed ideologies and were uncovered from analysed presuppositions. From the results, it is evident that the presuppositions analysed from the opinions portrayed a negative representation towards the performance of Jubilee government. Metaphors of suffering, hopelessness, distrust and disappointment revealed the attitude of opinion writers towards he Jubilee government. The lexical choices revealed that there are instances when the government is represented as powerful and also perceived as powerless. This study made a contribution in giving insight into the peculiar power and ideological structures implicit in political opinions from local digital dailies in Kenya. | en_US |