A Comparative Analysis of Crisis Reporting in the Malaysian and Nigerian Newspapers

Abstract

In practically every country across the globe today, there are spontaneous and long-standing crises that could jeopardize the corporate existence of the nation and on a larger scale disturb the stability of the world. Crises resulting from economic, political, health, environmental and social situations among others appear to be threatening global population. Malaysia and Nigeria are no exceptions to crisis and each of them do experience crisis now and then. The news media in both countries have a unique and exceptionally important role to play when covering a national crisis. In this wise, accurate and appropriate information about a crisis is an expectation that is required if governments of the two countries want to allay fears from the public. This is because modern democracy depends on a vibrant news media to keep the public informed. At no point is this more important than in times of crisis. This is a comparative study on how newspapers in Malaysia and Nigeria reported the political, economic, health and environmental crises that the two countries experienced from 2007 to 2009. The reason for this comparison is because of the fact that Malaysia and Nigeria share same colonial experience, and both have the press that is modeled after the British standard. In these two developing countries, the audience depends heavily on the mainstream for direct access to information; hence what constitutes a crisis is determined by the mainstream media, owned and controlled by the government. The choice of newspapers for this research work is as a result of its significant role in informing the people of both countries, irrespective of the fact that the internet, with its attendant social media has changed the media landscape across the globe. The research used content analysis to compare the coverage of these crises by newspapers in the two countries, with the aim of determining the differences in the rate of coverage between the two. Other objectives are to observe the trend of crisis occurrence in the two countries, and determining the sources of information for the newspapers. The research relied on the framing theory. One of the findings of the paper is that Nigerian newspapers have significantly reported more crises stories than the Malaysian newspapers.