Television News Coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic in Nigeria: Missed Opportunities to Promote Health Due to Ownership and Politics

Abstract

This study examined Television news coverage of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria from February 2020 to July 2020. The focus was on African Independent Television (AIT), a privately owned TV, and Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), a government-owned TV. We also interviewed ( n = 30) participants to understand their view on media coverage of the pandemic. We found that the TV stations paid adequate attention to the issues of COVID-19. However, the private media allocated more prominence to the coverage of COVID-19. By implication, the private media had more COVID-19 stories telecasted on its headline which also appeared as the first headline in many cases. Furthermore, they had more stories that were aired 61 seconds and above. The findings also showed that the government media outlet cited more of government officials while the private media dueled more on the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). The private media had more negative tone stories, and most of its stories used visual and motion footages. Overall, our findings suggest that media ownership and politics play a large role in the coverage of COVID-19 in Nigeria. This has affected the attitude of the public as many of them no longer see the pandemic as something serious, but rather politically motivated virus to highlight the failings of the political party in power.

Promoting COVID-19 Vaccination Using the Health Belief Model: Does Information Acquisition from Divergent Sources Make a Difference?

“…We speculate that this might be due to the content broadcasted via traditional media during the COVID-19 outbreak. A content analysis study of COVID-19 reports revealed that traditional media coverage concentrated on macrolevel information of the pandemic’s development, such as updating the relevant statistics of infections and deaths [ 65 ], which would increase individuals’ perceived severity of COVID-19. However, people may find it difficult to relate macrolevel information to personal life, resulting in this media channel having no significant impacts on personally relevant factors such as perceived susceptibility, benefits, barriers and cues to action.…”

Newspaper framing of the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria

“…Additionally, a research by Apuke and Omar (2021) on how television covered COVID-19 in Nigeria discovered that the Nigerian television stations paid adequate attention to issues of the pandemic. The study however showed that private television stations allocated more time to the coverage of COVID-19 than public television stations.…”

Discourse Analysis of Mass Media Surviving Strategies in Post COVID-19 Era Nigeria

“…This really indicates that the mass media have a crucial role to play during pandemic. Other scholars who carried out studies on the role of mass media in preventing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic also affirm that the mass media provide adequate coverage of the pandemic, irrespective of some shortcomings, thereby reducing the extent to which the disease would have caused havoc to human health and the society [50,51,7,52,[53][54][55]33]. According to Arinze-Umobi & Chiweta-Oduah [51]:…”