Coverage of the National Assembly Crises in the Nigeria’s Fourth Republic by Select Mainstream Newspapers

Abstract

The study was conducted to determine the coverage given to various crises that occurred
in the National Assembly of Nigeria from 1999 to 2016 by The Guardian, The Punch and
Vanguard newspapers. Content analysis was adopted while coding sheet was used as the
instrument of data collection. Results showed that the select newspapers published 1,740
news articles on National Assembly crises from 1999 to 2016. Findings indicated that
most of the news stories on the National Assembly crises were written in double columns
(62.1%), multiple columns accounted for 32.4%, while single column was employed in
disseminating 5.5 % of the crises stories. The main crises that rocked the National
Assembly were financial corruption (40.3%), leadership tussle (12.3%), bribery (10.5%),
forgery accounted for 9.6%, budget padding (8.5%) and impeachment of National
Assembly leaders (8.7%). Results of the Chi Square tests on the null hypotheses showed
that there is statistically a significant difference between the newspapers and the types of
crisis reported as p < 0.05. This means that the P value for types of crisis is significant to
prediction on press reportage of the various National Assembly various. Therefore, it was
concluded that as a result of the importance or danger which the crises rocking the
National Assembly posed to the continued survival of democracy in Nigeria, the select
newspapers gave the various crises attention with reasonable coverage.