On 3 March 1986, a fatal confrontation occurred between the police and the inhabitants of Guguletu, a residential area near Cape Town, South Africa. Seven inhabitants were killed. The incident was not without controversy, and received wide coverage in the press. A decade later, in 1997, the events were recalled when two members of the police who had been involved in the confrontation applied for amnesty before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Once again, the hearing received wide coverage in the press. In this article the author performs a comparative analysis of the reportage in the South African press in respect of the event in 1986 and the 1997 amnesty application within the framework of Critical Linguistics. It is hypothesized in Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis that the public media can convey their ideology in a subtle manner through language use. Because news discourse does not occur in a vacuum, but is the product of the social and political system in which journalists operate, the way in which the different sociopolitical contexts of the two events found expression in media reports is also indicated. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
