| dc.description.abstract | Kenya has been undergoing substantial transformations in the socio-economic, political and cultural realms. These changes have been influenced by several factors both internal and external, including Western Education and its attendant values, individual freedoms, human rights and women empowerment among others. These have seen the gradual breakup of the traditional values, norms and cultural prohibitions in most African communities. As a result, the role of elders and other significant persons like aunties and uncles in guidance and counseling of the young have been replaced by other institutions including Schools, old and new media, religion and the peer group.
The majority of the people rely on the media especially the press on what is happening around them which later help form public opinion on issues. The media therefore sets the public agenda on pertinent issues. In the news making process, an event is deemed important or worthy of discourse, if it merits a mention in the news media. The media achieves this by framing on event or events in such a manner that it will hold public interest thus attaining its agenda. By reproducing dominant ideology recurrent in society, the media through its agenda setting role makes sense of the world.
The Kenyan press media has not adequately covered homosexuality and issues related to it. Since the media practitioners are part of a society that condemns homosexuality as a sin, unnatural, ungodly, homosexuality has received negative coverage for a long time. The strong belief that homosexuality is unafrican, not part of the African culture is the main driving factor ofthe media's negative coverage of homosexuality in Kenya. There is relatively little research in this area of study in Kenya, as such this study provides an insight into the representation of homosexuality in print media namely the national dailies including the Daily Nation and the Standard for a five year period.
This study analyzes how the media portrayed homosexuality and homosexuals to its readers. News reflects what is really important to a society; minority coverage in mainstream news reporting provides insight into the (social) status of minorities. This research employed content analysis of the 'daily national English newspapers in Kenya. Content analysis is a research design for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the content of communication. Content analysis research method can be categorized into a number of steps.
This research applied a number of steps undertaken while carrying out a content analysis. These steps include: selecting the research topic, deciding on the sample, define units of analysis, constructing categories, creating coding forms, training coders, collecting data, measuring inter-coder reliability, and analyzing data. The media coverage of the homosexuality issues has been explored through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the newspaper content. The quantitative method was used to measure the duration and frequency of the news reported and qualitative analysis to interpret the viewpoints presented by the news articles. This supports what Smith, 1975 (cited in Van 2006, p. 2), suggests that the same blend of both quantitative and qualitative analysis should be used-because qualitative analysis deals with forms and antecedent-consequent patterns of form, while quantitative analysis deals with duration and frequency of form. | en_US |
