Print Media Reports and the Minorities in Nigeria:: Interrogating the Social Responsibility Doctrine

This monograph assesses Nigeria's print media coverage of minorities' issues vis-a-vis their social responsibility function. Two research designs: content analysis and survey (FGD's) were used for the study. Data for content analysis were collected from a sample of 72 systematically selected issues of four purposefully selected newspapers (print media). The data for the survey (FGD's) were collected from a sample of 156 respondents. Analysis for content analysis was done using frequency and simple percentage scores, ranking and tabulation. For the (FGD's), the qualitative method of explanation building was utilised. Results indicate that minorities related issues were sparingly covered by the four newspapers studied. Table 1 for instance, indicates that only 100(33.3%) out of a total of 300 stories they published were on minorities issues as against 200(66.7%) which were on majorities issues. It was also found that pictures (42%) were the preferred formats of presentation of minorities' issues. Further, analyses indicate that the direction of coverage of minorities' issues was preponderantly negative.