Digital Media Coverage of the 2017–2018 Banking Crisis in Ghana: A Framing Analysis

Abstract

The literature on news framing largely focuses on political news. When Ghana experienced what came to be known as the “banking crisis” in 2017/2018, there was wide media coverage of the issues that came in its wake and that provided an avenue for studies on the framing of a financial phenomenon. This paper examines the online media framing of this crisis through the quantitative content analysis of 97 news articles from two online news portals: Myjoyonline and Graphiconline, which are private, and state owned. The comparative analysis of these two websites showed the predominance of the attribution of responsibility and conflict frames in their reportage, reflecting the infant stage of digital financial journalism in Ghana. Notwithstanding, the study revealed differences in how the websites used the news frames in some significant respects.