Fairness and Balance in Election Campaign News Stories During the May 2005 Ethiopian Election. A Study of “Addis Zemen” and the “Reporter” Newspapers
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Date
2006-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
In today’s world, the media has become one of the most important sources
of information on candidates running for office in an election. Along with
that, the media has been thoroughly studied in order to assess how fair
and balanced their coverage of candidates and political parties were
during the run up to election. In this content analysis study of fairness and
balance in election stories, the two newspapers (Addis Zemen and the
Reporter) coverage of the May 2005 election in Ethiopia were considerably
unfair and imbalanced in the space, prominence and visibility given to
candidates and political parties running for seat in the government. Of
course, readers have only one in six chance of encountering a story that is
both fair and balanced in the two newspapers. This study also found out
that stories covering the 2005 Ethiopian election in these newspapers to be
much more imbalanced than balanced in both partisan and structural
dimensions according to measures applied in the study. Hence, while the
proportion of stories in the Addis Zemen newspaper favoring EPRDF
candidates were noticeably higher than other contestants, the CUD
coalition party and its candidates received much more attention than their
counterparts in the Reporter newspaper. Moreover, individual stories in
the two sample newspapers are constructed to give a great deal of
attention (in terms of space, prominence and visibility) to one candidate
and/or political party than other opponents. Accordingly, approximately
equal proportions (83% in Addis Zemen and 85% in the Reporter
newspaper) of the stories in both newspapers are imbalanced by one up to
four component measures. Overall, this study suggests that there is a lot
that has to be done to achieve the standards of fairness and balance in
both the Addis Zemen and the Reporter newspaper.
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Election Campaign News Stories