Nigerian mass media handling of conflict situations in the West African sub-region

A content analytic study examines the coverage of conflicts within, between, and among nations of the West African sub-region by three of Nigeria's leading national dailies and three major weekly news magazines. The aim of the study was to find out how far the newspapers and news magazines made efforts to contribute toward the resolution of the conflicts, in terms of the extent to which they covered the conflicts, and how they went about presenting their news stories, writing their editorials, and making their commentaries on the conflicts. The results showed that the dailies and the weekly news magazines made fairly good efforts to report on the conflicts, and that they gave relatively appropriate emphases to conflict stories, and exhibited such other professional standards as balance, constructiveness, and responsibility in story writing and presentation. However, these standards did not apply to all the nations of the sub-region to the same degree, except for emphases and constructiveness. Nigerian conflicts took a large majority of the media's attention in terms of absolute coverage and balance and responsibility in story writing and presentation, as against conflicts in the 15 other West African nations.