Discursive strategies and ideologies in selected newspaper reports on the Nigerian

News reporting on conflict situations mainly manipulates discursive and representational strategies in portraying people, actions and events either negatively or positively based on certain prejudiced ideologies. This article examines salient discursive strategies deployed by Nigerian and Cameroonian newspapers to represent socio-political ideologies in their reports on the Bakassi Peninsula border conflict. Data comprise 127 instances of discourse strategies drawn from two Nigerian and two Cameroonian English-medium national newspapers published between August 2006 and August 2010. By integrating insights from van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis, findings reveal that both countries’ reports create polarity of positive in-group and negative out-group ideologies through seven discursive strategies which include slanted headlining, negative labelling, evidentiality, number game, hyperbolism, victimization and depersonalization. The strategies embody ideological prejudices of positive self- and negative other-representations which are rife in both nations’ news reports on the disputed Peninsula