A Comparative Analysis of Crisis Reporting in the Malaysian and Nigerian Newspapers

In practically every country across the globe today,there are spontaneous and long-standing crises that couldjeopardize the corporate existence of the nation and on a largerscale disturb the stability of the world. Crises resulting fromeconomic, political, health, environmental and social situationsamong others appear to be threatening global population.Malaysia and Nigeria are no exceptions to crisis and each of themdo experience crisis now and then. The news media in bothcountries have a unique and exceptionally important role to playwhen covering a national crisis. In this wise, accurate andappropriate information about a crisis is an expectation that isrequired if governments of the two countries want to allay fearsfrom the public. This is because modern democracy depends on avibrant news media to keep the public informed. At no point isthis more important than in times of crisis. This is a comparativestudy on how newspapers in Malaysia and Nigeria reported thepolitical, economic, health and environmental crises that the twocountries experienced from 2007 to 2009. The reason for thiscomparison is because of the fact that Malaysia and Nigeria sharesame colonial experience, and both have the press that is modeledafter the British standard. In these two developing countries, theaudience depends heavily on the mainstream for direct access toinformation; hence what constitutes a crisis is determined by themainstream media, owned and controlled by the government.The choice of newspapers for this research work is as a result ofits significant role in informing the people of both countries,irrespective of the fact that the internet, with its attendant socialmedia has changed the media landscape across the globe. Theresearch used content analysis to compare the coverage of thesecrises by newspapers in the two countries, with the aim ofdetermining the differences in the rate of coverage between thetwo. Other objectives are to observe the trend of crisisoccurrence in the two countries, and determining the sources ofinformation for the newspapers. The research relied on theframing theory. One of the findings of the paper is that Nigeriannewspapers have significantly reported more crises stories thanthe Malaysian newspapers