Covid-19 Pandemic and Newspapers' Readers in South-East, Nigeria: Views and Perspectives

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a significant impact on all aspects of life, including the media industry. This work focused on South-East Nigeria newspapers’ readers’ perception of the Covid-19 pandemic, based on the coverage by The Guardian, Vanguard, and The Sun newspapers. The period under study in the research was from January 2020 to September 2020, The main objective was to find out how readers of newspapers in South-East, Nigeria perceived the news and the effects of the virus. A wide range of conceptual and empirical literature was reviewed with the social cognitive theory and media framing theory used as anchorage to the study. The survey research design was used. The population of the study was 667, 500 while ths sample size was 384. The study revealed the high rate of respondents’ frequency of exposure to Covid-19 reports in the selected newspapers. The result also showed that the newspapers’ readers had a generally high level of understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, it was discovered that the extent newspapers reported the pandemic helped inform the readers about the disease and how to prevent its spread. Amongst others, it was recommended that the Nigerian government and media organisations should intensify their efforts towards educating the public on the pandemic, its prevention, and management.