Main Article Content
Abstract
Just only six months, and President Tinubu administration had already thrown the citizens into more hardship than his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, left them. This paper investigated the economic policies of President Tinubu’s six months in office. It covered the period of March 1 to August 20, 2023. Anchoring on framing and Systemic Functional Linguistics, the paper content-analyzed 76 editorials of two randomly selected online private newspapers – Punch (56) and Premium Times (20) – to compare their manifest contents, framing language, headline stylistics, slant, semantics, syntactic features and impact. Stories were sourced through motif sampling, and data presented on tables using simple percentages. Findings showed 17 themes with 235 stories. Punch had 139 stories and Premium Times 96. It was also found that the lengths of the editorials according to the number of paragraphs were Punch 1,082 (80.8%) and Premium Times 257 (19.2%) with a grand total of 1,339 paragraphs. The ten longest paragraphs in Punch had 279 lines (61.7%) while that of Premium Times constituted 173 lines (38.3%). Again, Punch was more elaborate in its editorializing than Premium Times whereas the latter was more consistent in paragraph structuring. It was discovered that Premium Times, bending towards the state, chose to underreport the case, remain silent, or neutral. Finally, the paper found the impact of the economic policies were highly negative and had thrown the people into untold hardship. Policy recommendations were proffered.