International Journal of Development in Social Sciences and Humanities

This paper aimed to critically analyse how social actors were recontextualised in the discourses of news articles on selected public protests in 2016 in Ethiopia. To this end, the paper analysed the linguistic ways in which the public protests were represented during the recontextualisation of social actors in the reportage of two newspapers, namely the Reporter and the Ethiopian Herald. News articles from the two newspapers were selected purposively. The analysis revealed that different representations were employed in the two newspapers. Among the different representations were inclusion and exclusion of social actors in the public protests, and the use of different referential strategies to represent them as protestors. In this regard, the Ethiopian Herald was identified to be reproducing the structure within which determination of discourse by ideologies is located and delegitimising the public protests, but the Reporter tended to criticise and attempt to transform the same structure during its representation and had recurring tendency to legitimise the public protests during the representation.