The upcoming presidential election has captured the attention of the entire country, with four major candidates thronging the length and breadth of the nation canvassing for votes to grant them access to Aso Rock villa. To better understand the dynamics of this presidential election, we have conducted a data analysis of the media coverage of the four major candidates from June 24, 2022 to February 18, 2023. We collected over 18,000 newspaper articles from about 19 news organisations in Nigeria. Using the data from these news sources, we have attempted to gain some insights into the themes of the media coverage of each candidate in the race.
Our analysis has focused on four key areas: the distribution of media coverage across different news sources, the most common themes and issues covered in news articles about each candidate, a summary of the articles’ sentiment, and changes in media coverage over time. By examining these areas, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the media landscape surrounding the election and identify any biases or differences in coverage between different newspaper sources.
The news articles cover a wide range of topics, including the candidates’ campaign events, policy proposals as reported by the newspapers. The news sources included in the dataset are some of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country and especially those that have online visibility as the data was extracted from the web sources and this represents a broad spectrum of political affiliations.
To ensure that the data is clean, a thorough cleaning of the data was done and natural language processing techniques were implemented to extract relevant information from the news summaries, including the most common themes and sentiment of the articles.
Our report presents the key findings of our analysis, providing a detailed breakdown of the most common themes and sub-themes for each candidate, along with a discussion of the potential implications of these findings for the election. In doing so, we hope to provide valuable insights into the role of the traditional media that can inform future election strategies and help to shed light on the complex dynamics of the political landscape in the lead-up to the election.
Key Findings
After analyzing the data there are several key findings that shed light on the media coverage of the candidates and how they can potentially shape the sentiments of the voters.
Firstly, we found that Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC received the most coverage from the newspapers, with over 41% of the news articles mentioning his name in the news title. Atiku Abubakar of the PDP followed with about 28% of the news articles mentioning his name. Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) came third with about 27% and Kwankwaso of the NNPP came fourth with about 4%.
The interesting thing about the coverage also was that the news articles did not only mention one candidate per article but mentioned two or all of the candidates in their headlines. Only two candidates were mentioned jointly with all other candidates – Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC, which might suggest that they are very popular in the race. Kwankwaso was mentioned the least amount of times along with other candidates.
When exclusive coverage was considered, a case where only one candidate’s name appeared on the headlines, Tinubu had about 38.4% of the news coverage, while Atiku had 23.9% and Obi had 23.7% and Kwankwaso followed with 2.9%. In the remaining 11%, either two or more candidates were mentioned on the headline.
Coverage per candidate and a combination of candidates as they appear on news headlines
Of the data gathered, Vanguard newspaper had the highest level of coverage with 2842 headlines mentioning at least one or more of the presidential candidates. Daily Post came in second with 2,083 and The Punch provided the third most coverage among the news organisations surveyed with 1,862.
Coverage by top 15 news organisation
It must be said here that this is a snapshot of the articles that these organisations have published during the period under review and does not indicate the absolute true number of articles published with the name of the candidates appearing in the title but a snapshot of most of the articles published.
Most of the news organisations focused on the three major candidates in the race as about 96% of their coverage was focused on the three candidates indicating that this election may very well be a three-horse race as also suggested by election polls from several organisations.
Most of the news organisations gave what can be termed, a balanced coverage of the three main candidates although the candidate of the ruling APC had more coverage on each source. There is an outlier in terms of coverage per candidate as The Nation newspaper gave an overwhelming level of coverage to the candidate of the APC. Out of the 1827 articles from The Nation, when looking at the exclusive coverage, the APC candidate got about 1073 which is about 62% exclusive coverage, while the PDP, the LP and the NNPP candidates got about 319, 301 and 24 news articles respectively.
January appeared to be the busiest month with the highest number of news headlines featuring the candidates with over 3,124 articles, followed by November 2022 with 2,692.
Breakdown of monthly coverage
Breakdown of monthly coverage per candidate
We found some common themes on the news titles and for each candidate. The most common words appears on the word cloud. Of note is the fact that the LP candidate’s party appeared less often than the other candidates. A possible explanation for that might be the fact that the full name of the party along with the acronym appears on the word cloud suggesting interchangeable use during coverage or possibly a case where it is not used as often as the other parties in the news headlines.
Additionally, we conducted sentiment analysis on the news summaries and found that overall, the sentiment towards the candidates was generally positive in all the reports.
Overall Sentiment analysis on the news summary
Sentiment analysis on the news summary per candidate
Overall, these findings provide valuable insights into the media coverage of the presidential candidates and the sentiments of the voters. As the election approaches, it will be interesting to see how these findings play out in the voting booths.
