Orientation Function of the Press: A Content Analysis of the Coverage of Substance Abuse by Two Kenya Dailies

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyse the orientation two leading Kenya newspapers (the Daily Nation and East African Standard) have given to the Kenyan public with respect to the coverage of substance abuse in Kenya between May 1996-April 2001. The content analysis method was used. There are 1826 days in the five-year period out of which, 556 editions of the Daily Nation and East African Standard were found to have carried stories on substance abuse. Thus, a third of the news- papers had substance abuse stories. Systematic random sampling was applied in selecting the newspapers. Out of these, 279 newspapers were obtained with 332 substance stories. Using a coding sheet prepared for that purpose, the stories were coded and analysed using the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 10.0 for windows. Cross tabulations and a correlation between the kinds of substances reported and the respective social class of the people involved were done. It was found that most of the substance abuse stories were in form of hard news. Also, a large majority of the stories portrayed alcohol as the most commonly abused substance in Kenya. Another key finding was that most of the stories depicted male adults as being highly involved in substance abuse while very few stories that were published concerned children and youth involvement in substance abuse. Furthermore, it was found that substance abuse was accorded prominence de- pending on the magnitude of the consequences of the specific cases that occurred. Thus, highly tragic cases were given more coverage than less tragic ones. Such cases appeared to be governed by the number of people who either died or were seriously affected as a result of consuming the substances. In view of this, the Kenyan public was made to view substance abuse as a social problem only when there were such tragic incidences.