Relationship between online newspapers coverage and salience of 2011 Nigerian presidential election issues and candidates` attributes among Nigerian students in Malaysia

Abstract

The study investigates agenda-setting effects of online newspapers on perceptions of and attitudes towards issues and candidates’ attributes among Nigerian students in Malaysia in the 2011 Nigerian presidential election. The study is based on the assumption that election times increase the public need for orientation and that online media provide abundant opportunity for foreign residents to stay connected with their nations’ political development. Agenda-setting theory, which tests the relationship between mass media coverage and salience of issues and issue attributes among members of the public, has been tested using different media formats, and in many locales across the globe. However, the generalisability of findings remains disputable given the focus of the majority of the studies on established democracies, and the ever-changing media landscape. Amidst the extant gap, the migration of traditional media to the virtual realm and the seeming fragmentation consequences of online media environment open new debates about the viability of agenda-setting as a theory of media effects. By replicating agenda-setting findings in the traditional media on a new media platform, this study intends to fill the existing gap in the literature and introduce additional dimension to locales and contingencies in agenda-setting research. Content analysis of three Nigerian online newspapers which yielded 260 news articles on the 2011 presidential election was conducted to gather data on the media agenda of issues and candidates’ attributes. A cross-sectional survey of 321 Nigerian students in Malaysian selected universities and colleges, using self-administered questionnaire, was also conducted to develop public agenda of issues and candidates’ attributes. The two data sets were used to test the seven main hypotheses raised in tandem with agenda-setting theoretical postulations. Findings show that the majority of Nigerian students sampled in this study read online newspapers frequently and considered politics as the most important content. The results also suggest that issues and candidates’ attributes emphasised in the online newspapers strongly correlate with substantive issues and attributes perceived by their readers. In addition, increased exposure to online newspapers, to some degree, correlates with increased consensus on candidates’ issue emphases and attributes among different religious and geopolitical region subgroups. The results also demonstrate significant contributions of perceived issue emphases and candidates’ attributes to the candidate preferred by Nigerians sampled in this study. On the theoretical plain, this study suggests the incorporation of diasporic community into the possible locales for testing agenda-setting theory and the use of responses from online media audience as opposed to machine-generated responses used in past studies. Practically, the study suggests that media organisations should be conscious of enlarged political public sphere offered by online news media and demonstrate social responsibility towards audience within and outside their countries of operations. Also suggested is the need for corporate communication professionals to continually explore the saliency of the objects of their message with a view to send the best message to their publics. A policy on the need to fast-track the actualization of Nigerian diasporas’ voting rights is also suggested.