PRINT MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF NIGERIAN WOMEN IN THE NEWS: A STUDY OF FOUR SELECTED NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS

This study investigated newspaper representation of women in the news. A total of four newspapers were studied. They are Vanguard, The Punch, The Guardian and ThisDay. The duration for the study was three years (January 1st, 2015 to December 31st, 2017). The study was guided by three objectives and two hypotheses. Content analysis was used for the study with the code sheet as the instrument for data collection. Simple percentages were used to answer the research questions while the chi-square test of independence was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The result showed that entertainment and domestic news about women appeared more than other categories like economy, politics, education, health and the environment. Also, the tone of newspaper representation of women was largely negative. The researcher recommends, among other things, that journalists should improve on their representation of women in the news since women constitute 49% of the population of Nigeria