Communication & Language Arts
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://repository.ui.edu.ng/handle/123456789/284
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Partisanship and selective reporting in Nigerian newspapers’ coverage of elections(Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2018-12) Ojebuyi, B. R.; Salawu, A.This study examined the level of objectivity demonstrated by Nigerian newspapers in their coverage of elections with specific reference to the Nigeria‘s 2015 presidential election. Textual analysis was used to examine news stories about electioneering activities of the two leading political parties—the People‘s Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC)—as reported by The Nation, Nigerian Tribune, The Punch and Vanguard newspapers, which were selected purposively based on their national reach and ownership. The newspapers foregrounded some news stories about the political parties and their presidential candidates while they buried others in manners that reflected biases influenced by ownership and political alignments of the newspapers. This trend has implications for Nigeria‘s democracy as the frames adopted by the news media to report electioneering activities may determine the voting decisions of the electorate and the final outcome of elections. Therefore, Nigerian news media should be fair and objective while reporting sensitive issues such as elections.Item In media we trust versus the media we trust: information subsidies and credibility of editorial content in Nigerian newspapers(Association of Media and Communication Researchers of Nigeria, 2020-04) Ojebuyi, B. R.; Adekoya, O. F.The mass media serve as the forum for public discussions, political debates and the forging of consensus. However, it has been argued that media efforts to engage, empower and educate audiences are puny owing to several factors such as excessive reliance on public relations contents and well-funded agendas that dominate the media space. Media Studies in many countries have confirmed the growing reliance of journalists on Public Relations (PR) materials—also called information subsidy—but studies in Nigeria have not investigated this phenomenon and its implications for media gatekeeping and agenda-setting functions. The current study was designed to fill this gap. Agenda-setting and Gatekeeping media theories were employed as framework, while mixed methods design was adopted. From two Tier-1 newspapers (The Guardian and Punch), a total of 1,216 news stories drawn through constructed week sampling from 4-11 January 2016, the year the first Nigerian PR industry report was published, were content analysed. This study confirmed the growing reliance of Nigerian newspapers on information subsidy. This reliance on PR materials weakened the gatekeeping function of Nigerian newspapers, but did not undermine their agenda-setting function as the newspapers devoted their prominent pages (17%) to self-generated contents compared to the volume of materials PR (20.3%) confined to inner and less-prominent pages.