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One of the major campaign promises of the former US president Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign was to bar Muslims from entering the United States. Donald Trump kept his promise by issuing an executive order on assumption of office. The executive order banned Muslims from seven countries from entering the United States until a judge in Washington halted the executive order. The story received wide coverage in the media. This article will study the news coverage of the executive order in three leading international media organizations, AlJazeera English (AJE), the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. These three media organizations were selected because they provide different perspectives to news and have global audiences that consume the news on daily basis. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), the article seeks to compare how the three media organizations pitched the story. CDA is interested in identifying the relationship between power, ideology and social inequality. The article explores the issues related to power, ideology and social inequality in relation to the Trump’s executive order as reported in the three news media organizations. What are the ethnic, political and cultural issues that dominated the discourse of Trump’s ban on Muslims in the three newspapers? The results from the study found ideological differences in the coverage, with AlJazeera and the New York Times being slightly more critical of Donald Trump and his policies in their approach, while the Wall Street Journal was supportive of the executive order. Nevertheless, all three news organizations were similar in promoting discourse, which promotes the interest of power elites. This approach in news discourse further contributes to creating a divided society that is unequal in nature. The article concludes by recommending the practice of a more contextual journalism that promotes a peaceful and harmonious society.

This article examines the reporting of corruption in the Nigerian press. The purpose of the article is to develop a thesis that explains the factors that influence the practice of journalism in Nigeria using the reporting of corruption as a yardstick. The article stems from in-depth interviews with Nigerian journalists in 2007 in which they were asked about the way they report corruption, and whether the regional divide in the country is apparent in reporting stories about corruption. Following the work of Hallin and Mancini (2004, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press), this article suggests that what exists in Nigeria is regional parallelism, which implies a modification of Hallin and Mancini's framework of political parallelism. The findings of the research suggest that regionalism is a key factor in Nigerian journalism. However, it is much more complex than the simple assumption of north-south dichotomy; rather, there are intra-regional factors in the nature of ownership in the Nigerian press. The regional parallelism thesis identified six factors that explain the character of the Nigerian press. The article recommends that courses on corruption and the media should be introduced in Nigerian and other African universities teaching journalism and mass communications, so that future journalists will understand the challenges ahead. The article also recommends that an independent commission for the protection of journalists in Africa should be established.

Using interviews conducted with Nigerian journalists, this article explores Nigerian journalists’ understandings of investigative journalism, and whether they use it to investigate the allegations of corruption scandals against various public offi ceholders. The results show that Nigerian journalists have a fair understanding of investigative journalism. However, they do not fully agree that it is being practiced. The results also show that clientelism is a feature of journalism practice, and one of the factors that impedes the practice of investigative journalism. The research has identified the challenges militating against the practice of investigating journalism in order to uncover the cases of corruption scandals. Such impediments include poor remuneration, bad working conditions, corruption within the media, and the relationship between publishers and politicians.