Visibility of development stories in selected religious media discourse

This study explores patterns in the portrayal of development issues in the religious media from 1993 to 2021, in an attempt to illustrate the existence of hierarchical representations of development issues using sources, actors, and dominant frames. To this end, we use a quantitative method that considers the development content of two Ethiopian religious magazines: Hamer and Hintset. Our results reveal that across the selected years, the two magazines together presented 685 articles on development (359 the Hamer and 326 in Hintset). We employ data analysis using SPSS software, in which both descriptive and inferential statistical techniques were utilized for data presentation. We determine that political, economic, and natural resource development issues are the most scarcely covered issues as compared to social, moral, peace themes. Economic (chi-square = 5.122, p = 0.024, and p < 0.05), social development issues (chi-square = 6.207, p = 0.018, and p < 0.05) have a relationship with the year of publication in Hintset. Adherents, believers at the grassroots level, were the most frequent sources and story actors in the magazines. This shows participatory development communication was employed in the mediatization of development issues. The frame of development issues did not have a relationship with the year of publication. Finally, Hamer and Hintset included significant coverage of development issues, although development priorities are different. Hamer covered more social development issues whereas Hintset covered more moral development issues. In summary, our findings reveal that the religious media's representation of development (685 articles, 38.8%) is at a high level in Ethiopia. We, therefore, suggest that local and global development agencies should work with faith-based media as development partners.