Media Ownership and the Coverage of Child Rights in the Nigerian Newspapers

A!ass media ownership and its effects on different aspects of mass media performance has been the subject of many studies. This topic attracts many scholars due to the importance of mass media in social life of society and their ability to·affect people: Mass media contribute to building strong nations, and create feelings of unity by transmitting values and norms in messages. Afass media play the role of an agent of the secondary socialization process and can contribute to successful socialisation of individuals into existing social life. It is against this important role of the media that this study examined how the coverage of child rights is influenced by the ownership of media organisations. This article, through content analysis, examined two national newspapers of different ownership structure, government-owned and privately-owened. The findings show some differences in the pattern of coverage. adopted by the two newspapers. Besides, while coverage of child rights by the newspapers was generally low, it was observed that the government-owned newspaper.did a little better in handling some areas of the reportage than the privately-owned newspaper