A Comparative Analysis of the Coverage of the 1994-95 National Constitutional Conference by Government-owned and Privately-owned Newspapers in Nigeria.

For a very long time now, the independent press in Nigeria have been variously accused of bias and under-reportage by critics within the Nigerian government cirole. These critics believe that the independent press are socially irresponsible when it comes to the coverage of governmental programmes, especially controversial ones. They, also believe that it is only the government-owned mass media which usually give government the required full and positive attention in the business of news dissemination. The problem of this study, therefore, was how actually the government reported itself in its mass media, i.e. how the government-owned newspapers covered the 1994/95 National Constitutional Conference, vis-à-vis the privately-owned newspapers. The objectives were to compare the manner of reportage of government news by privately-owned and government-owned mass media. In other words, it was to find out the degree of their over-reportage/under-reportage of positive/negative news about government, and make necessary recommendations based on the research findings. To carry out the study, four research questions were posed: a. What frequency of coverage did the sampled newspapers give to the constitutional conference news items? b What volume of coverage did the news items on the conference receive from the newspapers? c. What was the direction of coverage of the conference’s news items by the newspapers i.e. whether positive, negative or neutral? d. What prominence was given to straight news stories on the conference in the newspapers? Also, four national newspapers were purposively chosen to represent the government-owned and the privately-owned newspapers: a. Daily Times b. Daily Star c. Vanguard d. Daily Champion Each of the sampled dailies had 52 issues, one for each week for the period covered (June, 28, 1994-June, 28, 1995). Altogether we sampled 208 issues of the four newspapers. The unit of analysis was news items on the conference which included straight news stories, editorials, features, frequency distribution of news items was determined by the counting of news items. Moreover, each story was measured in column inches and coded as positive, negative or neutral. In addition, the attention score (page placement) of straight news story was obtained by scoring a banner front page lead story 5, and any other front page lead 4; back page lead story 3, and other back page story 2; while any inside page story was scored. The study, among other things, revealed that even-though the government-owned newspapers gave less coverage to the conference they published more positive stories than the privately-owned newspapers. On the other had, the privately-owned newspapers published more negative and more neutral stories than their government-owned counterparts, moreover, the government-owned newspapers gave less prominence to positive straight news stories than the privately-owned newspapers. These findings, therefore, show that the government is also guilty of the charges of under-reportage of itself, and to an extent, of negative reportage of itself. However, the government, at times, tend to over-praise itself, depending on the issue at stake.

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