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Framing the COVID-19 Health Pandemic: A Comparative Analysis of Six Nigerian Newspapers Chika Ebere Odoemelam School of Communication, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Pulau Penang, Malaysia. Author's Contact Detail: E-mail Address ✉: ochikaebere@yahoo.ca ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4923-3545 Accepted March 07, 2021 Since January 2020, almost all the countries of the world have witnessed the outbreak of a global health pandemic like never before. This health pandemic, popularly known as COVID-19, has impacted negatively on the health, economic, social, and overall well-being of humanity globally. As a result, this study used content analysis to explore media framing of the COVID-19 pandemic in six Nigerian newspapers, namely, Daily Post, The Daily Sun, The Nation, Premium Times, This Day, and Vanguard. The research findings revealed that the six selected newspapers amplified the pandemic’s coverage using the frames of economic issues, public healthcare crisis, health workers’ strike, and corruption with different ferocity and salience. It was also found that the dominant news frames of economic issues, corruption, and public healthcare crisis received negative tone coverage across all the sampled papers at varying degrees. In contrast, the tones mostly used in framing the pandemic in the selected newspapers were positive, negative, and neutral tones. Thus, the study concluded that the media in Nigeria and elsewhere play a significant role in framing public health issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The author suggests that further studies should be focused on how media health-related messages in a pandemic influence the public’s health behavior and impact the practices of small and medium business owners. Key words: framing, Covid-19, newspapers, health pandemic. Full Text PDF (590 KB) |