Media Framing and Coverage on the Involvement of Civilian JTF in Combating Terrorism in North-East, Nigeria

Abstract

 Available literature points to the fact that the media play an important role in structuring and reorganizing the audience’s perceptions about the operations of Civilian Joint Task Force (JTF) in combating terrorism in North-East, Nigeria. This study sought to ascertain media framing as covered and reported by some newspaper organizations on the involvement of Civilian Joint Task Force in combating terrorism in North-East, Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive research design. The code sheet served as the instrument for data collection. A total of 4,380 issues were selected from Vanguard, Punch, Daily Trust and Leadership newspapers for the three year period under study. A combination of content analysis and critical discourse analysis was used for interpretation of newspaper frames and data for the study. The study revealed that the level of prominence given to the media framing of the operations of Civilian Joint Task Force in combating terrorism in North-East, Nigeria was very low with majority (68.2%) of the news items hidden and highly concentrated in inside pages of the newspapers. The study showed that news reports formed the major sources of media frames on the use of CJTF to fight terrorism. The headlines and leads of most of the stories identified the important and contribution of CJTF in the fight against terrorism. Some dominant emerging frames were found in the textual analysis of the headlines and leads. These include victory frame, fear frame, relief frame and strategy frame. The study concluded that although Nigerian newspapers framed the involvement of Civilian JTF to combat terrorism frequently, the reports lacked depth and were lopsided in their approach to the issues. This study is an additional contribution to the growing literature on newspaper framing and fight against terrorism in Nigeria. It  removes the interest from the perpetrators of violence and focuses on the policies and efforts of government and civilian to combat terrorism. It was recommended that  Nigerian newspapers should give prominence to terrorism and security related issues. Newspapers should report the efforts of civilian JTF within the headlines and front page news.