Comparative Analysis of Public Officers’ Corruption Framing in Newspapers

Abstract

This research was conducted to examine and compare the prevalence of public officials’ corruption frames in the online version among three popular Nigerian newspapers. Individual news article on public officials’ corruption was the unit of analysis while the reliability coefficients calculated using Holsti’s formula resulted to 90.0%. This study discovered that in the framing of 2016 public official corruption issues, the newspapers varied significantly with p=0.002 and p=0.000 respectively on corruption frames. However, the study, anchored on framing theory, identified the economic consequence frames, the responsibility attributes, and the treatment frames in the corruption issues. Further results revealed that the economic consequence frame identified the financial losses with the total percentage of 63.8%. The Nigerian government was framed as having highest responsibility for corruption eradication with the total percentage of 79.6%. Therefore, the responsible government was recommended for treatment of corruption in Nigeria with the total percentage of 82.2%. While this study is focusing on the aspect of media frames, future research can attempt to explore the area of audience frames which is not covered in this study.