This thesis explores the relationship between situational contexts and the linguistic and stylistic features of politicized language within the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics proposed by M.A.K. Halliday and others. The main area of research chosen is the wartime discourse of Japanese journalism during the Second World War. The research demonstrates the existence of a wartime register (as representation of real war) and characterizes its major stylistic and linguistic features. The secondary area chosen for the purpose of contrastive analysis is peacetime discourse concerning international conflict, (1) the Olympic Games and (2) whaling. In wartime discourse, journalism not only plays a significant role in maintaining public morale but is an active participant in the construction of the war effort. In the presentation of news, journalistic reports implicitly reconstruct reality by foregrounding death as sacrifice, glorious, and noble, the enemy as weak, and by obscuring a threatening situation by backgrounding defeats and losses. This reconstruction has the intention to regulate and control the ideas and behaviour of people, and to form a strong sense of solidarity in the nation. For this function, linguistic resources are exploited to structure, transform and sometimes mask 'reality' so that newly created discourse can articulate and legitimize new orders of reality which will meet the demands of a particular social situation such as consolidating the power of the state to wage war. Journalism in peacetime discourse, on the other hand, is not harnessed to a war effort and, thus, the use of linguistic devices to foreground and background news events is not an instrument of state power in an open society. The theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics is utilized in this research to provide an illustration and examination of the range and complexity of various linguistic and stylistic devices used in journalistic discourse.