Any form of language use is imbued with a particular meaning, purpose and ideological representation. As such, the order of Theme and Rheme and their organization in the clause as a message is not arbitrary or value free; it can be manipulated along with units of information, given and new, to achieve a rhetorical purpose and reflect a specific angle of telling a story (Halliday 2004). On the basis of the purposively sampled news stories on murders in Kenya from the year 2018 to 2019, the study qualitatively examines the efficacy of the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), as a theoretical tool in the analysis of ideology in four different newspaper in Kenya i.e the Daily Nation, the Standard, the Star and the Nairobian, in relation to the representation of murder stories. This study examines thematization in these newspapers. It hypothesizes that external forces have altered the main purpose of the media through the way news is written and organized; and that from a socio-linguistic point of view, the consequences of these forces are revealed within the textual features of texts. The findings indicate that that the order of theme and Rheme and their organization in the clause as a message are neither arbitrary nor value free. They can be manipulated along with the units of information to achieve a rhetorical purpose and reflect a specific angle of telling a story.