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.