Journal of Mass Communication & Journalism

The Nigerian mass media owe their Nigerian peoples the duty of transforming their diverse cultures respectively. Although the task seems thankless and complex, it is indeed rewarding, thankful, worthwhile, easy and simple if willing, committed and functional. The current worrisome state of our indigenous cultures is majorly because the media, that are suppose to duly rouse the peoples to their cultures and generally effect the transformation of these cultures, have simply abandoned their right roles in doing so for the otherwise. Rather, they have resorted to attrition and westernisation, dabbing them variously. This paper calls on Nigerian media to turn a new leave and take up active indigenous cultures transformation roles. Government, schools, parents (families), religious groups, corporate organisations and every individual must all actively join hands with the mass media in their new efforts and roles to transform our cultures. The paper basically draws from relevant library print sources, besides intuition and observation primary sources. The text content analysis, the descriptive method and qualitative comparative and analytical approaches ground the study.

In this study the researcher conducted frame analysis for opinion leaders’ tweets, to explore different types of frames that shaped the democracy debate after the revolution. The research took place in a period of 21 days, in the memory of the second anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, starting from: January 15, 2013 to February 4, 2013, before the revolution date and after. This study proceeded from a quantitative content analysis of 12 members’ messages on Twitter. Over all, it includes 386 tweets from three groups of opinion leaders, 53 from Former presidential candidates, 123 from Islamists leaders, and 210 from Political analysts. The aim of this study was to investigate the dominant frame, and compare which frames each group used. Analysis was conducted according to what type of “topics and issues covered, the tone of tweets (neutral, negative, positive), the key actors (government, politicians, and the public) and 5 frames analysis conflict, human interest, attribution of responsibility, morality and economic consequences according to Semetko and Valkenburg. Comparing which frames each group used results showed that, the attribution of responsibility and human interest frames were the most commonly used by the opinion leaders, followed by the morality frame then conflict frame and finally economic consequences. Attribution of responsibility and Human interest were most visible in the first group, former presidential candidates. Morality frame, Attribution of responsibility and Human interest were most visible in the second group, Islamist leaders. Finally, Attribution of responsibility and Human interest and conflict frame were most visible in the third group, political activists. Economic consequences frame was less visible compared to other frames. So we can conclude the whole analysis as: Responsibility frames are more often utilized by Former presidential candidates and Political activist while Moral frames are more often utilized by Former Islamist leaders.