Media Framing of Disability: A Content Analysis of the Daily Nation Newspaper in Kenya

Abstract

According to a United Nations report, around 15 percent of the world’s population, or 1 billion people live with disability. They constitute the world’s largest minority. This study investigates how people with disabilities are represented in the Daily Nation newspaper in Kenya. Employing media framing theory, the study using content-analysis method examined 341 newspaper articles published between 2016 and 2017 in the Daily Nation Newspaper. A thematic analysis was used where data was classified under the following frames stigmatization/ marginalization, social pathology, supercrip, medical, business/economic consequences, minority/civil rights, cultural pluralism, educative and legal model. Overall, the study showed there was more article representation of disabilities that were classified under the non-specified category 60.7% (n=207) while 27.6% (n=94) of the articles focused on visible disability while 11.7% (n=40) focused on invisible disabilities. The study also showed that traditional framing category is the more preferred category with 54% (n=184) of articles falling under this category, while the progressive had 37.4% (n=128) and the non-specified category had 8.8% (n=38) articles. Further analysis revealed that stigmatization/ marginalization frame was a widely used frame with 18.2% (n=62) of articles using the stigma frame ,while the business/economic frame had the lowest frequency.