A CRITICAL STUDY OF MEDIA BIAS AND IDEOLOGICAL IMPORTS IN SELECTED (IN)SECURITY REPORTS IN NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

Existing studies on insecurity have concentrated on agenda setting, framing techniques, and pragmatic strategies neglecting the relationship between stances and media bias. These relationships give a full understanding of group-induced motivations for the insecurity operation in Nigeria. This paper therefore undertook a critical study of media bias and their ideological imports with a view to identifying various forms of media bias and stances used by newspaper reporters on insecurity. van Dijk's (1996) Socio-cognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis with his ideological structures served as the theoretical framework for this study. The study adopted a qualitative procedure to analyse thirty (30) reports purposively. Data were selected from three National newspapers, namely: The Punch, This Day and The Guardian. The data span through January 1st 2021 and May 31st, 2022. Findings reveal that news writers often resort to bias and framing techniques in reporting insurgent related news some of which include biased nominal, biased adjective, naming bias and bias adverbs. This study further reveals that the presupposition of the ideologies found was to increase the information deliveries and acceptance in the written reports of insurgent actions of the various insurgent groups in Nigeria. Most importantly, the ideologies were used to present two major groups, namely the in-group and the out-group. While the in-group refers to Nigerian citizens who are portrayed as victims and innocent, the out-group refers to the various insurgency groups who bring about tears, pains and bloodletting among the Nigerian people. The study concludes that newspapers are often biased especially in their reportage of insurgent operations as revealed in the paper.