Picturing the Jos Crisis Online in Three Leading Newspapers in Nigeria: A Visual Framing Perspective

Abstract

This study examines the online visual framing of the Jos crisis, a set of religious and ethnic clashes in the Plateau state of Nigeria in the early twenty-first century. The online version of three leading Nigerian newspapers in Lagos—the Punch, the Guardian, and Thisday—were analyzed for four months, from December 2010 through March 2011. Findings suggest that the three newspapers were not heavy users of news photographs. In the limited number of photographs that were selected to accompany the news text narratives, the majority were photographs of politicians, such as the president and the governor. The majority of the photographs were close-ups of officials, onlookers, and guards. These images were used in a way that, based on previous scholarship, would suggest they failed to emotionally connect the readers with the ongoing crisis. Instead, the photographs served as a means of reinforcing the established narrative themes within the official discourse.