Abstract:

Dwelling on the framing theory from academic literature as the theoretical framework, this study examined how the Ghanaian news media framed the 2018 banking crisis seeking to find out how the key actors were portrayed in the reportage and whether alarmist frames were present in their coverage. A sizeable number of news articles from the most visited online news website was studied in a quantitative content analysis study. It emerged from the data examined that the media coverage had a heavy presence of alarmist frames and the management, board of directors and staff of the banks were portrayed as bad people whilst customers were widely seen as good people. It is believed that such alarmist frames may have contributed to the ensuing panic withdrawals and mistrust in the banking sector in Ghana.