THE PRESS, MISS WORLD PAGEANT 2002 AND THE KADUNA RIOT

The paper reports how the Nigerian newspapers reported the 2002 Miss World pageant and the riot that ensued in Kaduna town. Specifically, it examined the extent of newspaper coverage and the prominence they gave the issue. The paper also analyzed the

• direction (tone) of the stories in the newspapers in terms of being favorable, unfavorable and neutral or both. Judgmental sampling was used to select forty three issues of three national dailies (New Nigerian, This Day and Vanguard) from the day the offensive publication hit the new stand to the day the pageant was concluded in London from November I6h to December T .Content analysis was used to analyzed the data and the findings revealed that all the newspapers gave prominence to the Kaduna riot. Majority of the stories came on the inside pages with a lot of photographs. The Vanguard carried more stories than This Day and the New Nigerian. There was a balance in reporting both favorable and unfavorable by This Day and New Nigerian with Vanguard reporting more unfavorable(50%) than favorable stories(27.2%). New Nigerian did not give much prominence to the story as only five editions carried stories within the period. This Day newspaper was low keyed in their reports and published only 16 stories including the “offensive ” story and the editorial which contained the apology to all Muslims. The paper concludes with a recommendation that Nigerian journalist should avail themselves of the code of ethics manual and to know what is really required of them when reporting issues that are perceived as sensitive to avoid a re-occurrence like the ugly mayhem in Kaduna state.