Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent of media coverage and media framing types of Nations Nationalities and Peoples Day both in government and private print media outlets from 2010-2014 Three newspapers namely the government owned Addis Zemen and the privately owned Addis Admass and Reporter newspapers have been purposefully selected based on ownership access and large circulation of newspapers The study also included newspapers published in November 24 to December 24 from 2010 to 2014 Accordingly 135 news articles were analyzed by using both quantitative and qualitative methods Quantitative content analysis and in-depth interview methods were dominantly used Moreover in-depth interviews were conducted with 9 key informants from government and private media houses Accordingly the findings of the study revealed the dominance of development frame over other media frame types both in Addis Zemen and Reporter Amharic newspapers However in the weekly Addis Admass advocacy frame was the most frequently employed frame type for the coverage of NNPD of Ethiopia The result also indicated that Addis Zemen relatively published more news articles than Addis Admass and Reporter newspapers due to its daily published and government owned newspaper Since Addis Zemen is government controlled and owned newspaper it has no space to criticize the event whereas the weekly Addis Admass portrayed the event of NNPD of Ethiopia in a negative way because it has relatively better media freedom than the government owned media This shows that there are biased views in the newspapers towards the celebration of the event Hence journalists who are working for both media should be always governed by journalistic ethics and they should not be servile partisan and government should give freedom for the media