Media Agenda Setting Role in Fostering Maternal Healthcare Development: An Analysis of Kenyan Newspapers

Abstract

The role of agenda setting by the media is a powerful tool for tackling national issues and fostering national development. Since the media has a powerful leverage to determine the current thoughts of society, this review therefore sought to find out who sets the agenda of maternal healthcare, how media frame the maternal healthcare stories which could have a bearing on sustainable development issues. While the media in Kenya carry stories on maternal healthcare, they do not do that systematically through reporting sustainable development strategies. The articles in Kenyan newspapers carry reports on educational maternal health care features without highlighting maternal healthcare sustainable strategies, the journalists focus on recurrent themes but fail to frame the stories against the wider backdrop of fostering national development. The researchers selected the Nation and the Standard to look at how these papers have covered maternal healthcare over the last one year. The Nation and the Standard are the oldest newspapers in the country and have the leading online presence. In addition, the Nation and the Standard have nearly 90 percent of the country’s newspaper circulation. In general, newspapers are read by social, economic and policy elites, their content also reaches the local consumers through a readership effect. The methodology involved using search engines on the newspapers’ webpages we searched the words “maternal health” and limited the search from June 2013 to June 2014.