A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CHILD RIGHTS COVERAGE IN SELECTED NIGERIAN AND GHANAIAN NEWSPAPERS (1999-2003)

Against the backdrop of the task assigned to the media towards the fulfillment of the rights of the child; specifically as contained in article 17 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child and as required by the Oslo Challenge of 1999, this study examined the coverage given to child rights by the Nigerian and Ghanaian newspapers. Using content analysis research design, both government-owned and privately-owned national newspapers from the two countries were used. The study examined the extent of coverage given to child rights, the specific child rights issues reported, prominence given to the reports, journalistic genres adopted and the performance of government-owned papers in comparison to privately-owned newspapers, among others. A total of 1200 newspaper issues were randomly drawn from the four newspapers over five-year period, from 1999-2003. The study recorded high inter-coder reliability ranging between almost perfect and substantial agreement, thus establishing the appropriateness of coding instructions, category definitions and unit of analysis. The quantitative analysis used percentages and chi-square goodness fit. The qualitative analysis focused on textual abuse of structures that may constitute abuse of children. The results showed that while child rights issues were generally underreported by the four newspapers, Ghanaian newspapers gave greater coverage to child issues with 56.9% than Nigerian newspapers with 43.1% and the difference was very significant. The findings also showed that government-owned newspapers with 60% did better than privately-owned newspapers (40%) in reporting child rights. Furthermore, there was a lack of balance in the genres adopted in reporting child rights and poor public engagement on the issue. Moreover, the dominant voices behind child rights were those of advocates and NGOs, while children voices were hardly heard. The findings also revealed weak newsworthiness of child issues and lack of enough evidence to establish textual abuse of children in all the newspaper issues examined. It was therefore recommended that the newspapers should improve on the coverage given to child rights in all aspects to further stimulate public and policymakers response to the issue. There is also the need to have a policy guide that would ensure greater commitment on the part of the press to child rights. And finally, there is need for continuous existence of government-owned newspapers, in the interest of public service, as they are in a better position to report development issues like child rights, than privately-owned newspapers