ABSTRACT The discourse of Insurance is constructed and disseminated as part and parcel of modern life. Propaganda and awareness are always visible and universal in media and institutional communication. However, policy development and implementation standards differ from country to country, especially between developed and developing countries. This paper investigates a national newspaper editorial promoting insurance in Sri Lanka. The editorial, titled ‘New vistas in insurance,’ appeared on June 28, 2019, in Daily News. A linguistic approach called critical discourse analysis was used to trace general as well as ideological socio-cultural and political-economic implications covertly or overtly found in the editorial. Critical linguistic strategies were used to unpack the positions and identities of the discourse constructor, the insurer, and the insured, while revealing the constructed contextual meanings and notions. The findings were that the personalisation strategy is used to make insurance a fundamental need in life; spiritualization makes insurance an inevitable agent to safeguard religion and religious leaders; acculturation makes insurance a part of our culture; and politicisation and development agentization make insurance a leader to be respected and followed. These strategies take the form of apparent altruism, contrast, transfer moves, foregrounding and backgrounding, assumed and asserted evaluation, and emotional, ethical, and logical appeals to create fear of imminent risk and relief of lifetime benefits. Linguistic strategies such as nominalisation, verb and voice choice, word choices for verb and noun modification, and transition words contribute to these discourse strategies, especially in insurance promotion. This study highlights the need for further discourse analysis of Sri Lankan media persuasion strategies in the political, economic, and socio-cultural contexts of Sri Lanka. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, discourse, insurance and media, promotion
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