Keeping Up with Power/Corruption in a Pandemic: A Study of an Investigative Journalist’s Twitter Handle

Abstract

Investigative journalists have the special role of conducting investigations and reporting on them. In Nigeria, studies have confirmed that a lot of investigative reports are found in the traditional media, both broadcast and print, and most of these reports, which are about financial scandals, originate from government agencies saddled with the responsibility of battling corruption. This paper applies the social responsibility theory of the press to investigate the transformation and change in investigative reporting in Nigeria as occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic and disseminated on the social media. The study focuses on the COVID-19 tweets of Fisayo Soyombo, an acclaimed Nigerian investigative journalist who has over 101,000 followers on Twitter. Soyombo’s tweets from 1 April 2020 to 30 June 2020 harvested from his eponymous Twitter handle formed the study sample. By identifying narratives of corruption, scandal stories and follow-up stories in the tweets, the paper finds out that unlike what obtains in the traditional media, Soyombo initiates investigation into the non-financial activities of people in positions of authority and seizes the opportunity of asynchronous communication on Twitter to report his findings regularly. However, the same asynchronicity as well as the unfolding events of the pandemic also cause him to end up with many questions and not enough answers. Nonetheless, the paper concludes that such questions can form the basis of further investigations beyond the pandemic.