"In this paper, we investigate to what extent Nigerian newspapers practice peace journalism by emphasizing underlying causes of conflict in their reporting rather than stressing ethnic and religious divisions. We make use of a sequential mixed methods approach, which combines a quantitative content ... analysis of news reports with semi-structured interviews with Nigerian newspaper editors and journalists. Our results indicate that Nigerian newspapers do not explicitly use divisive language when discussing conflicts, but they rarely stress underlying structural causes either. While there is a willingness among Nigerian journalists to avoid potentially escalatory language, a dearth of resources and capacities impedes independent and in-depth analysis concerning the underlying drivers of conflicts." (Abstract) more

"Recent studies on conflict and terrorism news coverage have documented an ingroup bias as well as an increasingly negative discourse about Muslims in the wake of Islamist terrorist attacks. Yet, as most of these studies have focused on Western media and settings, the determinants of news media’s ... religious biases and out-group categorizations remain insufficiently understood. In this article, we draw on interviews with Nigerian media practitioners and a comparison of Boko Haram news coverage in two Nigerian newspapers—one Southern-based / Christian-affiliated and one Northern-based / Muslim-affiliated—to argue that it is crucial to consider a country’s political-religious demography in order to understand the way in which religious-based violence is covered in the news. In this respect, we identify micro-, meso- and macro-level theoretical mechanisms through which a country’s demography can promote domestic news outlets—regardless of their background and readership—to cover conflict in a more balanced, nuanced, and objective way." (Abstract) more