ANALYSING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ADVERTISEMENTS AND DEVELOPMENT NEWS IN DAILY TRUST AND THE NATION NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

The research focuses on assessing how coverage of advertisements influences the
coverage of development news in the Nigerian press by examining the relationship
between advertisements and development news in Daily Trust and The Nation
newspapers. The research is anchored on the political economy theory of the media. The
research employs quantitative content analysis method. Two national independent
newspapers, Daily Trust and The Nation were content analysed with a systematically
drawn sample size of 343 editions. Frequency distribution tables were used for
descriptive statistics while statistical measures of ANOVA and Regression were used for
inferential statistics. Findings revealed that at .05 level of significance, advertising has a
positive relationship with development news reports in the two papers; this means that as
advertisements increases, the coverage of development issues also increased. It was also
found that Daily Trust covered more development news than The Nation newspaper
during the period under review. It is recommended among others that the media should
adhere to professionalism and ethics in processing and reporting messages with a view to
ensuring all development related matters are fairly reported even in the face of pressure
from advertising revenue sources.