An assessment of the impact of mass media on the implementation of Nigeria's Vision 20:2020

The study examines first, second and third level agenda setting role of the media (the agenda setting process) in the implementation of Nigeria’s Vision 20:2020 in the context of the media as a public sphere and assesses the agenda-setting process across the three normative agendas: media, public and policy. Specifically, the salience of the Vision; the tone of news; the type of news; the source of news; the manifest attributes and the agenda setting process. The study employed pragmatism and mixed methods research approach to study four Nigerian daily newspapers- ThisDay, The Punch, The Nation and Vanguard, purposively selected and studied over a three-year period 2010, 2011, 2012 using content analysis. At the same time, a survey of twenty-five Journalists from Nigerian main stream media was conducted. It was found that the issue is salient in the media with 134 articles across the four newspapers. This is a confirmation of first level agenda setting. The study also revealed that all cognitive attributes of the Vision are salient in the media with varying impacts. Furthermore, the study adjudges the efficacy of third level agenda setting in the implementation of the Vision based on the salience of each of the attributes and how all the attributes network in ensuring the transfer of salience from the media to the public agenda. This completes the agenda setting process in a single study. Interestingly, the tone of news revealed conflicting results. While the content analysis revealed mostly positive tones, the survey result revealed negative perception of the Vision. These conflicting results are attributed to Mellado and Lagos’s reporter/sources bias in news (interventionist dimension) and reporter’s neutrality and distance from the fact (disseminatorinterventionist dimension), respectively. The study also found that the Nigerian media system, from pre-colonial to present day, possess features of different models of media systems. Specifically, Authoritarianism, Social Responsibility, Libertarianism, Political Parallelism, Instrumentalism, Media Market and State Control define the Nigerian media system. While race as a variable, is not a determining variable of the Nigerian media system owing to the monoracial nature of the country. The study concludes and recommends the adoption of ‘agenda setting process’ as the most suitable theoretical approach in any study that assesses the impact of the media in the implementation of an all-encompassing development plan anywhere in the world, but such a study should be country-specific due to the peculiarity of each nation-state in terms of the differences in media system, type of government, economic, political and socio-cultural factors.