Assessment of Print Media Reportage of Environmental Issues in Nigeria

ABSTRACT The results of the findings of this study reveal that the environmental issues covered by Nigerian newspaper are: flooding, environmental pollution/waste, climate change/global warming, deforestation, desertification and erosion. Of these issues however, flooding gained more coverage than the others. Nigerian newspapers frame environmental reports from frequencies, article placement, and article length as well as article tone. Much of the frame revolved around panic/fear, painting a hopeless situation and making government a colossal redeemer and savior of a victim- complexes-laden society. This scenario provides a cliché angle of an easy way to report environmental issues with an agenda of: what has government done to save the situation. Newspaper coverage using fear tactics influence public to see enormous problems in environmental issues. Such prism that they furnish to the public impoverishes them and makes them mentally incapacitated in networking environmental problems to solutions. Thus the palpable consciousness of such endemic problem and fear create a lack of a vision of how to solve them; more of a sense of well-informed futility in public. Therefore, the implications of newspaper coverage on public perception of environmental issues in Nigeria are: (i) public members do not see or perceive solution from the way environmental issues are reported in Nigerian newspapers, (ii) Mobilizing reports were characteristically impoverished, few and far between; compared with those that just mention the event or situation, and the ones that feebly attempt to identify the cause and possible solution. This is even the more so because environmental issues potency has been so reduced and trivialized to seasonal occurrence rather than a condition that has growing potential of reversing the many gains of development and destroying the world as we know it. A more appropriate way of framing and measuring framing is employing tones for verbiage like words, phrases and expressions used in reporting environmental issues in Nigeria.