TITLE:
Framing the #Occupy Nigeria Protests in Newspapers and Social Media
AUTHORS:
Nwachukwu Egbunike
KEYWORDS:
#Occupy Nigeria Protests, Media Framing, Old Media, New Media, Social Movements
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.2 No.5,
May
6,
2015
ABSTRACT: Nigeria witnessed #Occupy Nigeria Protests in January 2012, following government’s
removal of subsidy on premium motor spirits. This study looked at the frames
employed by the old and new media respectively in the #Occupy Nigeria Protest.
The three collective action frame building tasks proposition of the framing
theory: motivation, diagnosis and prognosis were employed in the content
analysis of the samples. The three national newspapers were Nigerian Tribune,
the Guardian and the Punch while the social media samples were an Occupy
Nigeria Facebook page, blog posts, conversations in Nairaland and Twitter.
Findings revealed that newspapers were better than social media in framing the
motivation, diagnosis and prognosis of the protest. It also showed that the
newspapers presented a more heterogeneous narration of the protest. This study
holds that newspapers are better contributors to the discourse of the #Occupy Nigeria
Protests than social media.