A new report paints a bleak picture of the state of the media in Africa’s most populous nation. The Media’s Agenda-setting Role: Insights from the Coverage of Nigeria’s 2023 Elections stresses the media’s role in educating and informing voters and presenting diverse voices amid a flood of vitriol and false information on social media. Adri Kotze spoke to Adenike Aloba, who spearheaded the research, about the “heartbreaking findings” and what newsrooms worldwide can learn from Nigeria.
- Audiences need explanations.
- Data can help restore trust in media and transparency.
- If we package existing inequalities into technology, we’ll have the same inequalities and gaps in the future.
- The media should stop think they are mere consumers or victims of technology.
Media coverage of the 2023 Nigerian elections is a “huge red stop sign” for other newsrooms covering elections across the globe this year, media development expert and research and data analyst Adenike Aloba warns.
With more than half the world’s population voting in 2024 in elections that could determine democracy, Adenike urges newsrooms to pause, review their strategies and avoid repeating the mistakes Nigerian media made. Crucially, she says, news organisations should ask themselves if their reporting will help the many young voters going to the polls for the first time make better decisions.
Democracy needs the news media – in fact, more so than ever, she says. In many African countries, though, the fight against regulation is “right in your face”. “It’s a journalist getting picked up and taken away for two years without the family knowing where they are. It’s offices being ransacked simply because you have done a story. So, regulation and understanding regulation and the fight against it, is a major concern for African countries. I can speak specifically for Nigeria.”
While these concerns are legitimate, Adenike says, news media must self-regulate and do introspection given dwindling revenue, audience trust and interest in news media.
She argues that elections provide the perfect window to analyse news organisations’ performance. When the opportunity arose to monitor and review the Nigerian news sector in the heavily contested presidential and national assembly elections in February last year and subnational elections in March, Adenike was ready for it.
She headed a team from the media, research and data analytics organisation Dataphyte that monitored coverage for two and a half months, covering 36 media platforms in 18 states across six geopolitical zones.
Meet Adenike Aloba at the 2024 FIPP World Media Congress, powered by Media Makers Meet, where she will speak about “Innovation at the Intersection of Media and Technology in Nigeria”. The event takes place from 4-6 June in Cascais, Portugal.
‘Two lies and a truth’
Although she has “always” worked in media, Adenike says her career focus shifted when she joined the Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism in 2017. She became interested in how to improve the media, what the big needs are in news organisations, and how to prepare for change. Adenike led work in media freedom, conflict and humanitarian issues and media monitoring.
“It’s one thing to understand that it’s challenging to be in the media space. It’s another to live every day with the reality of journalists being remanded without bail, journalists not being free to do their job, of repressive regimes,” she says.
In 2021, Adenike became managing editor and programme manager of Dataphyte, “pioneering data journalism in the Nigerian ecosystem”.
“That was a big challenge because when you say data journalism, a lot of people, especially in the Nigerian ecosystem at the time, assumed you were talking infographics.”
At Dataphyte, she edited the data journalism platform, trained journalists, worked with media organisations to implement data journalism, and helped design tech programmes and products that, for example, combine procurement data with beneficial ownership to show red flags on government contracts.
Dataphyte also built an elections reporting portal for real-time data collection and analysis of the 2023 elections in Nigeria, collaborating with journalists in the field. With the elections portal and a civic literacy arm in place, the organisation did data-based performance appraisal reports, focusing on issues such as health and education in the different states. It was a good opportunity to review print, broadcast and online media, Adenike says.
She describes the elections as, “to put a nice spin on it”, very dramatic.
European Union observers stated afterwards that the polls, the most fiercely contested since the end of military rule in 1999, were marred by problems that eroded trust in electoral processes. They recommended reforms to enhance transparency and accountability.
Adenike is less subtle than the EU observers.
“It was two lies and a truth – sandwich a small truth in the middle of two lies and hope people don’t find it.
“So, the media had a huge responsibility. It was clear even before the elections that someone needed to make sense of the noise coming from all channels, from social media, from everywhere.”
‘A bit of a state of emergency’
While Adenike acknowledges how hard it has been for media organisations in Nigeria to keep their doors open after the pandemic, she says there’s no denying that the news media is in “a bit of a state of emergency”.
“Elections are the one period where audiences pay attention to the media.
“So, what did we do with the attention that we had?”
The results were, she says, “heartbreaking”.
“We found that 80% of coverage was focused on who insulted who, who sabotaged who, who crossed to another party, what the electoral body was doing, and election rallies.
“The media predicted the outcome of the elections because the voices were the voices of the ruling party and its leading opposition. It would have been great if that was counterbalanced with programmatic issues. If we had all these political parties being the loudest voices in reportage and we were talking about education, climate, gender, healthcare and the economy, it would be great. [But] we missed the opportunity to get on issues that mattered to people.”
There was a frenzy, she says, and targeting and vitriol on social media. Adenike partly blames the media, which “told people who you align with were the important issues“, and not how politicians would solve problems. So, people “went to fight for the candidates they align with, for the region they align with”.
“If we’re just reporting intrigue, we’re setting people up to vote for the most entertaining candidate rather than the candidate who will do the job. Do we really want a world where people are voting for the most entertaining politician?”
Adenike refers to Nigeria’s estimated population of over 220 million people, of whom nearly half live in rural areas, to highlight another concern identified in the research. (The country last had a census in 2006, but is the most populous in Africa and the sixth most populous in the world.)
“Those guys at the grassroots, they’re going to stand in the rain and in the sun to make sure that vote counts. But there is almost no presence of print and online media at the subnational level. You can hardly find a paper focused on a community, focused on an area, focused on a state. And that’s 36 states plus the federal capital territory.”
If people in rural areas have little or no access to media, Adenike says, one has to wonder what powers election and civic literacy at local level.
“Are we leaving civic literacy to the propaganda machines of political parties?” she asks “Who is telling them what the important issues are? Nigeria is a country with over 200 languages. Who is speaking the language of these people to help them understand this is why the election matters and these are the issues you should focus on?”
What news media should do differently
If news organisations offer the exact same thing as TikTokkers, Snapchatters, bloggers, other social media “and everyone else we think are taking our audiences away” – only in a more serious voice or tone – “there is no fighting chance in hell of winning those audiences back”, Adenike wrote in a recent LinkedIn post on the elections research.
“This is not about format or styles but rather the content itself,” she wrote.
She says her frustration is that, sometimes, when you engage a room full of news veterans, there’s “resistance to the idea that the nature of your job has changed because your audience has changed”.
Adenike emphasises that audiences are key. Each organisation has to know its audience. Nigeria, for example, is a communal society. It is a culture that revolves around family rather than philanthropy, where people donate to causes.
“If people building membership models and subscription models don’t take that into account, that’s problematic because we don’t have a culture of, ‘Oh, I’ll just donate 10 pounds or I’ll just donate five dollars’. We engage. We know the person or the family or the hospital. So a lot of our philanthropy is driven by the personal in Nigeria.”
Adenike argues that while we should embrace technology, the news media can’t simply change the packaging. “We can’t simply slap paywalls on our pages or send membership messages if we don’t change the process.
“If we’re going to get better results, it can’t just be the output. It can’t just be the obvious. We have to rethink the process. How do we generate news? How do we make a product people want to buy?”
When it comes to reporting on elections, news organisations’ role is to help people understand and make better decisions, she says.
“I think ultimately, that’s it. Better decisions, better voting decisions, to have the proper issues to power their decision-making.
“Do we want to know, ‘Oh yeah, Donald Trump has launched new sneakers’? Or how do the actions of candidates impact on what will happen when they take over the country? One thing that is obvious today, is that the world needs explanations.”
Adenike says she is “humbly optimistic” about how data can restore trust in the media and improve storytelling. The evidence is in investigative stories, she says, and in the transparency and audience engagement data allows. The media should use all its data to build media-centric AI technology but, Adenike warns, the caveat is that data and technology should not be manipulated by bias.
“Pick up a random newspaper, and just count how many female voices there are. You will see a disproportionate number. And this is the data powering AI technology. Whatever we build on that, we’re building bias into it.
“I’m worried that all the inequalities that exist in our world today, we’ll package them into these technologies that are powering our future and we would have the exact same kind of inequalities, the exact same kind of gaps in the future.”
The media should stop thinking they are mere consumers or victims of technology, Adenike says.
“We have to get in the engine room and think how to make it work for media. I don’t want technology giants creating products for the media too. We need to create those products for ourselves.”
Listen to Adenike’s conversation with us here:
