This study investigated the agenda setting functions of the West African media in the early response coverage of COVID-19 and the extent of connection between the agenda setting roles and the reportage of the novel virus. Anchored on agenda setting theory, the study employed quantitative content, explication textual and collocation analyses to analyse 944
The increase in media proliferation as a result of the emergence of social media as alternative sources of news dissemination and consumption has led to many changes in journalism, such as declining gatekeeping and content scrutiny. Thus, headline construction and structuring play a crucial role in this new era of news. Like their counterparts all over the world, Nigeria’s mainstream media are not left out of this raging redefinition of news construction and distribution in a hyperbolic and propagandistic format, despite their significant contributions to democracy since its return in 1999. The rise of insecurity and the attendance of political uproars, buoyed by online misinformation through pluralistic digital media, triggers intentional or inadvertent mistakes among the hitherto respected and credible mainstream media causing the need to respond to the salient issues in the media spaces without being out of the mainstream. Using the content analysis and process tracing methods, this paper explores the influence of the current media agenda on the gatekeeping of news that is increasingly spreading misinformation via clickbait on the headlines of the mainstream media.
Media convergence is not a new concept in journalism studies, though available evidence indicates that convergence studies have been explored more in the global north than the global south. This study, contextualised in Nigeria, joins the media convergence conversation by exploring the sustainability of Facebook-radio convergence for distributing broadcast programmes by seventeen (17) licenced radio stations in Oyo State, Nigeria. As a computational content analysis study, researchers analysed 85 purposively selected programmes of the stations as broadcast live on their Facebook pages alongside the 9527 likes, 10,314 shares, 7007 comments and 170,681 views the programmes generated. Stakeholders’ interviews were also conducted for a broadcasting expert, presenters of some of the stations, together with audience of the selected stations. The main finding shows that programmes that focussed more on socioeconomic problems and opportunities, and were broadcast in the afternoon, evening and at night received more digital engagement than other programmes’ formats and time belts. Although high cost of Internet data subscription in the country, absence of Internet-enabled mobile phones among many adherents of radio programmes (both in rural and urban areas), epileptic power supply that sometimes leave many people with unpowered mobile phones as well as weak Internet broadband connectivity common to many locations in Nigeria threaten the sustainability of Facebook-radio broadcasting in Oyo State. Deployment of 5G network, installation of more network masts with strong bandwidth and training of radio presenters and radio stations' social media handlers on innovative and audience-participatory programme production are recommended.
Since the onset of the new coronavirus, the mass media, across the globe, have continued to draw special attention to the disease by adopting different pragmatic and rhetoric strategies. In Nigeria for instance, the news media have continued to draw people’s attention to the virus by using COVID-19 and coronavirus as synonymous lexical entities in the headlines of their news stories. These lexical choices are believed to have some influence on how the audience understand and seek information about the virus. However, existing studies in media and health communication have not copiously explored the relationship between the lexical choices by media to report the COVID-19 pandemic and people’s information-seeking behaviour about the virus. This study was, therefore, designed to investigate how Nigerian journalists used coronavirus and COVID-19 as the key terms to report the virus and how the pragma-semantic implicatures of the lexical choices influenced audience information-seeking behaviours. Pragmatic Acts and Information-Seeking theories were employed as the theoretical framework while online survey and content analysis were adopted as methods. Findings show that although Nigerian journalists used coronavirus (SD=2.090) more often than COVID-19 (SD=1.924) in the headlines, the audience employed COVID-19 (M=2.23, SD=.810) more than coronavirus (M=1.88, SD=.783) while searching information about the virus. Besides, journalists’ use of COVID-19 in the headlines to educate (Chi-square =37.615, df=11, P<.000), warn (Chi-square =26.153, df=11, P<.006), assess (Chi-square= 24.350, df=11, P<.011) and sensitise (Chi-square =24.262, df=11, P<.012) facilitated audience interest in seeking information about the virus than when coronavirus is used as a keyword in the headlines. The lexical choices made by journalists to report a health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic have implications for citizens’ knowledge about the crisis.
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