“The New Sheriffs in Town”! Newspapers Visibility of Kenya’s First County Governors

ABSTRACT

Content-analysing 2794 news stories in four national newspapers, the present study examines variables that predicted the coverage of 47 county governors between 2013 and 2017—the first term of Kenya’s devolved system of governance. Findings show that variables related to coverage as a “mirror of political reality” are the main predictors of the governors’ visibility in the newspapers news. To be specific, commenting on the topics of devolution and corruption are the strongest predictors, followed by criticizing the national government. County size (an institutional characteristic related to coverage based on news values) is also a predictor, although not as strong as devolution, corruption and criticizing the central government.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• devolution
• governors
• Kenya
• newspapers visibility
• political communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by United States International University-Africa [Internal Research Grants for Academic Year 2015-2016]. Note that some institutions might not have a proper way of documenting their research grants.