Conceptualising the Mass Media as ‘The Social Scientific Oracle’

This study is a qualitative content analysis of three Nigerian news magazines, examined using the library (desk) research method, to ascertain the mass media’s penchant for predictions. The study analysed the selected contents of Tell, TheNews, and Newswatch magazines that reveal some salient categories of predictions in the Nigerian media. Through the data analysis that supports some reviewed literature, the researcher observed that journalists have repositioned the media institution as an authority that makes forecasts for the audience. This prompted the researcher’s conceptualisation of the media as ‘the Social Scientific Oracle,’ as the finding aligns with the putative conventional norm of conferring a nomenclatural status to the media due to what they do in their society of operation. The researcher dissected the oracle in the Greek cosmology and the term in the African worldview and recommended that the media be conceived as the ‘Oracle’ in the Africans’ conception of it. Keywords: journalism, journalists, mass media, oracle, prediction, reportage